For most actresses, going from the cuddly fantasy world of a Walt Disney family comedy to the depraved nightscape of Weimar-era Berlin would be a mind- and talent-wrenching effort accomplished only in the wildest imagining.
But for Natasha Richardson, now the leading light of the talented Redgrave acting family, the shift between Disney’s family film “The Parent Trap” and Broadway’s sinful “Cabaret” was an acting “muscle-flexing” challenge.
And she managed it over the holidays.
Last Thanksgiving, she finished shooting Disney’s lavish remake of the 1961 “Parent Trap” with Haley Mills, playing the picture-perfect fashion-designer mother of twin daughters, who scheme to reunite her with equally perfect estranged husband Dennis Quaid.
Then, immediately after Christmas, Richardson plunged into rehearsals for the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of “Cabaret”–a dark-as-night Christopher Isherwood-based musical, in which she stars as the wayward waif Sally Bowles, seeking survival in a place and time as hellish, kinky and corrupt as the world has known.
“It was a terrific adjustment, really,” Richardson said, in an interview, “but that’s what you long for–to plunge from one different world into another. I felt an enormous sense of relief doing something like `Cabaret’ after being part of a huge movie machine like `Parent Trap.’ “
The change certainly agreed with her professionally. She won the Tony Award, Outer Critics Circle Award and Drama Desk Award for her performance as Sally.
Granddaughter of the late Sir Michael Redgrave and daughter of legendary actress Vanessa Redgrave, Richardson, now 35, has been associated mainly with serious roles.
A product of London’s prestigious Central School of Speech and Drama, she apprenticed doing Shakespeare and Chekhov in repertoire companies, winning the 1986 London Drama Critics Award for most promising newcomer.
Richardson has her mother’s low-register, audience-commanding voice and is sometimes mistaken for her on the phone. Richardson’s off-stage, off-screen speech is much less upper-class British than one might aspect. She has mastered a variety of American accents, ranging from Minnesotan to Southern.
She won a Tony nomination for Eugene O’Neill’s not-exactly-mirthful “Anna Christie,” and recently played F. Scott Fitzgerald’s crazed, ill-starred, Southern golden girl wife in cable television’s “Zelda.”
“Serious roles are what draw me and what people feel suits me and I gravitate towards in my work,” she conceded.
But in “Parent Trap,” which opened Wednesday, she is going for laughs (including a memorable screen belch).
“I guess you have to paint with broad strokes in a movie like this,” Richardson said. “It’s pure fantasy. Nobody lives like my character in England. This is a movie where everyone sleeps in $2,000 sheets and has a butler and a Rolls-Royce.”
“But I really liked this part,” she said. “Comedy can be just as hard as more serious subject matter–and I hadn’t done comedy for a while. I thought the drunk scene would be a challenge, and working with Dennis Quaid was a big attraction for me too. I think this (remake) is far more engaging than the original, and a more romantic version of it. I think if I was just playing a mom in a kid’s movie, I don’t think I would have done it.”
As for the belch, that was someone else’s.
“I opened my mouth and put my hand over it as if I was going to belch,” she said. “But actually I can’t belch to save my life, so they added that with sound effects.”
Real life for Richardson has been anything but a Disney movie.
Her mother’s marriage to her father, the late director Tony Richardson, was for only a brief five years, and Natasha had to divide her childhood between England and Los Angeles. Worse was to come.
“I’ve had to go through a great deal of trauma, actually, though I don’t want to talk about it all,” she said. “But, you know, my father dying of AIDS (in 1991) and my first marriage (to impresario Robert Fox) breaking up, among various other things, don’t qualify as an easy life.
“I don’t think life is ever. There are moments, and maybe I’m in a moment right now when things come together professionally and personally, so that you find you’re in a happy period in your life. But it would be foolish to think that life isn’t an ongoing struggle, because it is.”
A dividend of “Anna Christie” was that her co-star, Oscar-nominee Liam Neeson, became her second and present husband. They have two sons, Michael Richard Antonio, 3, and Daniel Jack, nearly 2, and live on the West Side of Manhattan, though movie work often takes them to Los Angeles.
“Los Angeles is not home for me,” she said. “No. I did spend a lot of time there when my dad worked there and I was about 11. When my dad was alive, it was one thing, because he was one of the few people I know strong enough not to be gobbled up by that town. I’m not strong enough. I would find it very demoralizing, living in L.A.”
When she returns to the stage, she’d like to do Tennessee Williams.
“I think, in a few years, I would love to do `Streetcar (Named Desire),’ ” she said. “I would love to play Blanche. . . . It’s wonderful that you can still get to do his plays. I wish there were people writing at Williams’ level in the movies. There just aren’t those parts written–those full-bodied, passionate women.”
She yearns most to do a film with her mother, with whom she has remained very close. They acted together only once, in Chekhov’s “The Sea Gull,” when Richardson was 22.
“We long to find something to do together, but it has to be the right thing,” she said. “One of my great regrets is that I didn’t get to work with my dad, so I’m going to make damn sure it doesn’t happen with my mom.”
