Vanessa Redgrave
Vanessa Redgrave is an actor, born 1937.
Vanessa Redgrave was born in London in 1937 and came to attention on stage, playing Rosalind in As You Like It for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1961. More than thirty-five West End and Broadway productions followed, along with an Olivier Award for The Aspern Papers in 1984 and a Tony for Long Day's Journey into Night in 2003. She holds the Triple Crown of Acting, an Academy Award, two Primetime Emmys and a Tony, which very few performers manage, plus a Volpi Cup and a BAFTA Fellowship.
On screen she has been nominated for the Academy Award six times across four decades, winning Best Supporting Actress for the title role in Julia (1977). The other nominations came for Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment, Isadora, Mary, Queen of Scots, The Bostonians and Howards End.
What she does is intelligence. Not the performance of intelligence, but the actual sensation of watching a character think faster than everyone else on screen and decide what to withhold. Volumnia in Coriolanus works that way. So does Ruth Wilcox in Howards End, and so does Max, the arms dealer in Mission: Impossible, who is plainly having a better time than anyone else in the film.
The late career specialises in the short, devastating appearance. She turns up very near the close of Atonement and the scene carries the entire picture. She is Jean du Pont in Foxcatcher, Dr. Wick in Girl, Interrupted, the lawyer Madeleine Rees in The Whistleblower. The most-heard work of her life may be a voice: she narrates Call the Midwife as the older Jennifer Worth, unseen, week after week. She has also been a political activist all along.
Movies (75)
- Cars 2 (2011)
- Cold Storage (2026)
- Mission: Impossible (1996)
- Atonement (2007)
- Girl, Interrupted (1999)
- Deep Impact (1998)
- Murder on the Orient Express (1974)
- Letters to Juliet (2010)
- Finding You (2021)
- Camelot (1967)
- Howards End (1992)
- The House of the Spirits (1993)
- The Butler (2013)
- The Estate (2025)
- Blow-Up (1966)
- Foxcatcher (2014)
- The Devils (1971)
- The Pledge (2001)
- Wilde (1997)
- Restraint (2008)
- Smilla's Sense of Snow (1997)
- Anonymous (2011)
- The Whistleblower (2010)
- Coriolanus (2011)
- A Man for All Seasons (1966)
- Cradle Will Rock (1999)
- If These Walls Could Talk 2 (2000)
- Evening (2007)
- Julia (1977)
- Bella Mafia (1997)
TV (7)
Where to start with Vanessa Redgrave
Six decades is a lot of ground, so pick a door. The prestige door is Julia, the title role that won her the Academy Award, and it remains the performance the rest of the filmography gets indexed against.
The cinephile door is Blow-Up, where she is the woman in the photographs and the whole film is organised around wanting to know what she knows. The Devils is the most extreme thing she ever did and it is not for everyone.
The literary door is Howards End and Prick Up Your Ears, where she plays the agent Peggy Ramsay and does more with restraint than the period film usually allows.
For late work, Atonement is essential, one short scene near the close that reframes everything before it, and Coriolanus holds the best Shakespeare performance she has committed to film. Mission: Impossible is the one your friends have seen, and she is enjoying herself enormously in it.