Vanessa Redgrave: The Miracle Worker
WE ALL know that stars are supposed to dazzle and dwarf the rest of us; that’s part of their appeal, especially the women’s. When I was in my early twenties a friend introduced me to Melina Mercouri, in person, in a movie theater in Manhattan, and she was gorgeous in a gargantuan, unearthly way; my mouth must have flown open when I saw her, because she laughed gaily at my awkwardness. I’ve never cared for Mercouri as an actress, but that was beside the point. When you looked at her, you realized that she couldn’t possibly have been anything else but a star, and it was your job to be dazed.
The effect of seeing Vanessa Redgrave, who is also a great actress, is viscerally much more powerful because of her Amazonian looks. She towers over most of the men she shares the screen with, and everything about her is magnified—the way she laughs, opening up that enormous, toothy maw, the way she eats. Even her line readings have a voracious quality, as if she were biting into her dialogue, even when she’s bringing her impeccable technique to bear on Shakespeare or Chekhov or Euripides. Though she’s capable of extraordinary delicacy, there’s no such thing as a small gesture in a Redgrave performance. She starred in O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night on Broadway in 2003 (a production I reviewed for this magazine), and when, alone on stage at the end of the second act, she pronounced Mary Tyrone’s line, “Then, Mother of God, why am I so lonely?,” she trailed one hand like a spider up the wall until it reached above her head. It was a poignant example of what the famous acting teacher Michael Chekhov called the “psychological gesture,” a physical embodiment of an emotional state, and its sheer size made it mesmerizing, like a Modigliani portrait.
Redgrave came to movies from the stage, where in 1961 for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her first movies, three of them, were in 1966. In , she had no lines, but when, at the wedding feast of her Anne Boleyn and Robert Shaw’s Henry VIII, she blew in his direction like a summer zephyr, she seemed to promise unimagined erotic pleasures, and she made Robert Bolt’s earnest, literate dialogue feel not only ponderous but extraneous. Her free-spirited aura and free-wheeling sexiness transcended both Karel Reisz’s , where she played an aristocrat whose nutty left-wing husband (David Warner), whom she’s left for another man, is determined to recapture her, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s , where she was the desperate mystery woman who’s willing to sleep with a trendy photographer (David Hemmings) in exchange for the roll of pictures he took of her and her lover in a London park. I thought was tiresome and silly when I was a teenager, and watching it again after all these years, I had the same reaction. And I’ve never been a fan of . But you can’t keep your eyes off Redgrave in either of these pictures. In she wears her hair piled high, which makes her impossibly statuesque, in the manner of an ancient Greek princess—like Andromache, a character she got to play five years later in . In her first scene she’s wearing a sleek white fur jacket and a matching jockey’s cap, and later she dons huge sunglasses. She’s such a great clotheshorse, and so naturally witty, that she manages to look hip and stylish while parodying her outfits at the same time. In she’s a stunning Mod creature in a short skirt and a tie. In both these films she’s playing opposite talented actors, but they seem like babies next to her, which mutes the appeal of both Warner’s adolescent posturing and Hemmings’s odd mixture of bad-boy sexual mischievousness and Peter Pan.
