Vanessa Redgrave
Redgrave, Vanessa
V anessa Redgrave believes the newspapers are out to get her, and she is right. As recently as 19741 was a member of a rat pack detailed to follow Miss Redgrave around Newham, a depressed and...
...Communism has failed, but so has the New World Order...
...Gosh, life is confusing...
...The conservative Chesterton was an anti-Semite (like the conservative Hilaire Belloc and the conservative T. S. Eliot...
...We crossed the Channel at Newhaven and were sick...
...and would not therefore have found myself looking into the most beautiful, and terrifying, pair of eyes on earth...
...I rang Corin [her batty brother] and asked him to come to my home then and there...
...Americanisms are dandy, in context...
...On the other hand, she would not herself willingly harm a fly, or even a child...
...She'd turn up at the Oscars in a red ribbon, naturally, but would be of no more concern to us than Richard Gere or Cindy Crawford...
...She insists that in 1967 the London papers were slavishly pro-American in their coverge of Vietnam...
...Napoleon is for us a Romantic and colorful character, his portrait part of the standard decor of little boys' bedrooms...
...In a book of this sort the Englishisms should be left alone...
...There is much in this vein, and pictures to prove what a heartbreaker she was at fifteen-and into her forties...
...She is, for example, UNICEF's Special Representative for the Performing Arts in former Yugoslavia...
...Owers, the gardener...
...When she joined the WRP it was called the Socialist Labour League...
...Perhaps we have one of Marx's "internal contradictions" here...
...Certainly not Jane Fonda...
...The many litanies of privilege in this book give it a surreal quality...
...But this is not fanzine stuff...
...Chesterton was very much in favor of a Jewish homeland, because he considered English Jews aliens...
...She is honest, even if (see below) she is often incapable of recognizing the truth...
...If it had not been for the WRP, Vanessa would today be known as a fine actressan English Meryl Streep-who got mixed up in radical left-wing politics in the 1960s and 1970s but who was now into pyramids and crystals...
...like the Marxist dog she is...
...All the same her girlish excitements work for me: I was fifteen and almost dying with excitement, when I went abroad for the first time...
...after "saving" Spain from liberal democracy and the malevolent forces (Communism and Freemasonry) which he was sure were latent in it, he ruled as caudillo for more than thirty-five years...
...but I mean to ask of him admission into the one Fold of Christ...
...Dogma is for religion, which is about death, judgment, heaven, and hell...
...Few of us these days salivate at the sight of a blonde wrapped in a red flag...
...How many of us can say as much...
...More to the point, she remains a player on the world stage...
...At 58, however, she remains an accomplished actress...
...Zounds...
...And so it goes...
...That's because, at least as she emerges from these pages, there is something sweet and vulnerable about her, as well as barmy...
...He came, and I told him I wanted to apply immediately to become a Trotskyist and a member of the Socialist Labour League...
...The lesson to be drawn from Vanessa's life is that political ideology is always a menace...
...She believes her cause is just...
...Many of the pictures, of course, are of theatrical performances, to accompany material in the text-much of it po-faced and Methodic-about acting...
...The index, however, is appalling, making the reviewer's task unnecessarily onerous, and the Americanisms aren't much better...
...In her support of people's liberation movements everywhere, she has consorted with people who treat children like flies...
...Francis X. Rocca is a writer living in Madrid...
...She maintains that in 1963 the British critics ganged up on her husband, the late, left-wing Tony Richardson, and panned his hit movie Tom Jones...
...Fonda said she was sorry about that gig in Hanoi, flexed her pecs, and married Ted Turner...
...They were not...
...I had a new gray flannel suit, two berets, cherry pink and gray, and a red blouse and blue skirt I had made myself in dressmaking class...
...The proper response to Vanessa is one of gentlemanly moderation...
...Indeed, all the pictures are delightful...
...It is thanks to the generation of Hitler and Stalin that the word "dictator" has become a synonym for "tyrant" and "mass murderer...
...The idea has gained ground that she is anti-Semitic...
...To be sure, some antiZionists are anti-Semites, but then, as anyone who has explored the darker recesses of the European mind will know, some pro-Zionists are antiSemites...
...Next year, no doubt, she will be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her work on behalf of the PLO, the ANC, and the IRA...
...VANESSA REDGRAVE: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY Vanessa Redgrave Random House/ 419 pages/ $25 reviewed by STUART REID 64 The American Spectator March 1995 Inevitably, Marxist smog blocks out the ancient sunlight, as Lady Bracknell mounts her soapbox to denounce, for example, Mrs...
...but then so were such non-Marxists as Patrick Buchanan and his Holiness Pope John Paul 11...
...At times, she even sounds like a bleeding-heart liberal, as when she writes that just after the war, in her privileged part of London, "little children played in the gutter in bare feet...
...They did not...
...Her conversion happened in September 1973, and conversion is the only word for it: I realized at that moment that I had no other way to live except in a political struggle with a party that knew that a serious study of history is necessary if we are to gain understanding and prevent a recurrence of repression...
...O Francisco Franco, of course, did not go back to his plow...
...There was no need...
...There is no dignity in it now that Marxism is dead...
...There is nothing here for Julia Roberts...
...Former comrades fight one another...
...We reporters-shuffling, hung-over Calibans, hair curling over our collars, bell-bottoms trailing in puddles-had not actually been instructed to give Vanessa a hard time...
...There are some enchanting accounts here of life at home with "Michael" (her father, the actor Sir Michael Redgrave), "Rachel" (her mother), Nanny Randall, Kenneth the chauffeur, Birdie the cook, Ella and Mary, the housemaids, and Mr...
...V anessa's selective memory comes to us courtesy of the Workers' Revolutionary Party...
...Like Julius Caesar, he tried his hand at literature, but it is doubtful that future generations of schoolchildren will learn Spanish by translating Raza, his autobiographical novel-cum-screenplay...
...The Trotskyite Miss Redgrave is not...
...We knew the score: here was a rich, upper-middleclass actress preaching Marxist theory to single mums on welfare...
...Once upon a time the archetype was Cincinnatus, the noble Roman with whom George Washington would be reverently identified, who took up absolute power reluctantly, then returned to his plow as soon as he had saved the Republic...
...In that, of course, she is at one with the Serbians, who have not forgotten the Ustashi...
...not for politics, which is about nothing more important than life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...
...former enemies make common cause...
...The story has not changed over the years, but shafting Vanessa is not as satisfying as once it was...
...In Vanessa's case, happiness was something pursued in adolescence...
...Many horrors face the post-Communist world...
...Old alliances collapse along with the old certainties...
...Stuart Reid is assistant features editor at the London Sunday Telegraph...
...As recently as 19741 was a member of a rat pack detailed to follow Miss Redgrave around Newham, a depressed and depressing working-class district in the East End of London...
...Mind, Vanessa finds "fascists" in Croatia too...
...In 1977 she won an Oscar for her performance in Julia, the film based on Lillian Hellman's unreliable memoir...
...T rue, she is an acquired taste...
...Vanessa has never apologized...
...Thatcher's "police state...
...She is loyal to her friends and has stuck to her guns...
...And while he shared Napoleon's taste for pomp and self-promotion (as well as his shortness of stature and the distinction of youngest general in European history), he had nothing of the Corsican's flair and immortal charisma...
...J f only she had stuck to acting...
...But why must the editors at Random House assume that American readers are too dumb to understand that, for example, "pavement" means "sidewalk...
...In politics, ideology leads to dogmatism, and dogmatism to the locked ward...
...He does not know of my intention...
...Vanessa believes the Bosnian Mussulmen are victims of Serbian "fascists," much as William Safire does...
...On the other hand, does the Generalissimo belong in the despicable FRANCO: A BIOGRAPHY Paul Preston Basic Books/ 1,002 pages/$37.50 reviewed by FRANCIS X. ROCCA 65 The American Spectator March 1995...
...Her memories are tailored to fit her present beliefs...
...Julius Caesar, who overthrew that Republic, has always had his defenders even among liberals...
...Or Meryl Streep...
...it is as though Lady Bracknell had written My Struggle...
...Vanessa is not one of them...
...How very like the experience of John Henry Newman, who, in Apologia Pro Vita Sua, recalled how he had written a letter to friends on October 8, 1845: "I am this night expecting Father Dominic, the Passionist...
...A general election had been called and she was standing as a candidate on behalf of the Workers' Revolutionary Party, a Trotskyite outfit with a handful of members and a thick file at MI5 headquarters...
...On the other hand, if she had stuck to acting the world would have been denied this fascinating account of bourgeois radicalism, and I would never have cornered her in Newham Town Hall all those years ago ("Miss Redgrave, Miss Redgrave, would you like to make a statement to the Times...
...Vanessa Redgrave was strongly opposed to the Gulf War, 0 r-N urs is the century that gave dictators a bad name...
...Sony, that was sarcastic...
...In 1993 she was awarded the Sakharov Medal by Yelena Bonner...
...she is also a member of British and American Actors' Equity, the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Screen Actors Guild, the British Film Institute, and an honorary member of the Memorial Society for Victims of Stalin's Repressions...
...When it was no longer chic to be radical, Ms...
...Was there no room on the street for these emaciated victims of bloated capitalism...
...In fact, she is antiZionist, which is not necessarily the same thing...
...It had all the elements of a good story: sex, class, money, hypocrisy...
Vol. 28 • March 1995 • No. 3
