Natasha Richardson’s latest movie was a family affair, what with mum Vanessa and aunt Lynn also in it, she tells James Christopher
It’s impossible to spend an afternoon with Natasha Richardson without falling a little in love. It’s not just her sea-green eyes and velvet voice. It’s the hair slipping across her face, the soft laugh, the awesome pedigree. Richardson is a scion of one of Britain’s most famous theatrical dynasties. She is an intimidating beauty, and the glamorous wife of Liam Neeson. Yet she is an unaffected joy to interview: open, thoughtful and warm. I’ve never met an actress so immune to her own celebrity, or so easy in her skin.
She sprawls on a sofa in a suite at the Dorchester, dressed in a chic black shirt and matching trousers, looking improbably relaxed. Her lead in the latest and last Merchant Ivory film, The White Countess, is, she thinks “the best I’ve ever looked on screen. I’ve never been shot like that in my life and I never will be again. I look so Garbo-esque I may have to retire.”
The 42-year-old is hypnotic in the title role. Richardson plays Sofia, a Russian aristocrat who is forced to prostitute herself in Shanghai after the Bolshevik Revolution. It is 1936. China is in turmoil. The Japanese are about to bomb Shanghai. The countess is hired by an infatuated American ex-diplomat (Ralph Fiennes) to run his stylish new nightclub while the world outside crashes and burns.
It’s a fascinating period of Chinese history which has been compressed into a chamber play by Kazuo Ishiguro. The mood is almost Chekhovian in Sofia’s family squat. “I read a lot about prostitutes in Shanghai during this time,” says Richardson. “The most sought-after were Russian women — not necessarily aristocrats — because of their charisma. They held themselves very erect and cultivated an erotic aura of grandeur.”
James Ivory’s immaculately dressed production belies an exceptionally tough shoot. The facilities in China were basic. Chunks of the budget kept disappearing. The language barrier was intractable. And Richardson had the daunting prospect of acting opposite her mother, Vanessa Redgrave (who plays Sofia’s aunt), for the first time since they were on stage together in The Seagull in 1985.
“I was initially nervous at the prospect. I thought I’d panic: ‘Oh God, Mum’s over there watching me. What if she doesn’t think I’m very good?’
“In the event, I didn’t have to worry about our emotional scenes. I only have to look into her face and she makes me want to cry. There’s a purity about my mother that’s just heartbreaking. I felt that she and Lynny (her aunt Lynn Redgrave, who plays Sofia’s mother-in-law) just wanted to help me do the best job I possibly could.”
It’s a wonderfully restrained performance by Richardson, full of unexpected flavour and subtle nuances. Whatever the box-office fortunes of The White Countess, her stock as a serious screen actress is rising fast. After years of parts in films she admits “no one ever watched”, she made a sensational impact last year as a sexually repressed doctor’s wife in David Mackenzie’s Asylum, of which she was also executive producer.
It was a brutal labour of love. Richardson spent six frustrating years trying to get Patrick McGrath’s postwar novel from page to screen. Her chilly performance as Stella, who becomes obsessed with one of the asylum’s most unstable patients, made the wait worth every minute.
“I was embarrassed when Liam finally saw the film because the sex is so raw. But Stella is the part I’m most proud of. She is not that dissimilar to Sophia in The White Countess. They’re both profoundly sad characters.”
I fear the poet in Richardson is hopelessly addicted to tragedy. “I’m afraid so. I don’t know whether it’s because of the books I read as a child — Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre — or the films I watched. Sam Mendes noticed the same instinct when he directed me as Sally Bowles in Cabaret at the Donmar in 1997.
“I was really struggling with the funny, bright, perky scenes. He said: ‘You know, you’re just the opposite of most actors. You just want to splash around in all the dark painful areas, and you get really frightened of doing the confident comedy stuff.’ It’s where I’m drawn.”
The White Countess is released on March 31