A Most Dramatic Family: The Redgraves by Donald Spoto

Michael Redgrave

The Redgraves: A Family Epic by Donald Spoto

To most Americans, actor Michael Redgrave sprang full-blown into existence in his 1938 debut movie The Lady Vanishes, an Alfred Hitchcock thriller. (A trailer from the movie appears at the bottom of this post.) In fact, he was already a highly successful performer on the British stage. Throughout his life he preferred these live performances, for which he had been trained, to work on the silver screen. He made movies only when he was broke, which considering his lavish and complicated lifestyle was fairly often. Today we are fortunate to have those few celluloid performances to judge his talent by.

Margaret Scudamore Redgrave

If there is a genetic predisposition for theatrical performance, the Redgraves must have it in spades. Michael was born in 1908 to Roy Redgrave and his wife Margaret Scudamore Redgrave, both upcoming actors. Roy moved to Australia soon after, as much to escape various responsibilities and peccadilloes as in pursuit of bigger professional opportunities. Margaret followed him with baby Michael, but quickly became tired of Roy's irregular earnings and frequent philandering. She and Michael returned to England. On board their ship was James Anderson, a wealthy Englishman returning home from a successful career among the tea plantations of Ceylon. Margaret became first his mistress and later his wife, so Michael grew up free from the financial uncertainty that plagues many children of actors. While his mother and stepfather felt that acting was an unsuitable and chancy profession for a man, Michael's schooldays included many successful amateur performances that predicted his future.

Rachel Kempson, actress and
wife of Michael Redgrave

He met Rachel Kempson, his first and only wife, in 1935. She was the leading lady in a play where he had a secondary but important role. He was relieved to find out that she was tall; from her delicate features the 6-foot-3-inch Michael had feared he might "have to go down on my knees to kiss her."

Rachel was the product of a loveless marriage. Her mother was such a primly raised Victorian girl that her husband on her wedding night reputedly said, "I'm afraid I have to ask you to do the most awful thing." Beatrice did her duty; Rachel had two brothers, but Beatrice had no gift for or interest in either maternity or her "marital duties." As a result Rachel, whose beauty and talent inspired a producer neighbor to sponsor her to the prestigious London School of Dramatic Art, never felt quite adequate or lovable.

Rachel fell instantly and completely in love with Michael during rehearsals, and indirectly proposed to him during the run. While he was very fond of her and flattered by her adoration, his previous experiences and interest had all been with men. Despite his misgivings about his sexual orientation––which he shared with her beforehand––they were married in 1935, only a few months after they had met.

Vanessa Redgrave

Vanessa, their first child, was born in 1937, followed by Corin in 1939. Baby Lynn followed later in 1943. While the two older children were very close to each other and their parents, Lynn, throughout her childhood, felt left out and ignored by her busy father. Despite their parents' hectic work schedules and Michael's frequent absences with new lovers, the family were all very protective and supportive of each other.

Until her late teens, Vanessa was determined that she would become a ballerina, despite her height and gawkiness. What was unacceptable in a ballerina enabled a commanding stage presence, so in 1954 she gave up her hopes of dancing and enrolled in a prestigious drama school. Spoto quotes one of her classmates, Dame Judi Dench, who remembers her as "Too tall, too dependent on eyeglasses, too outspoken in her criticism of old-fashioned teaching methods, and one who gave scant evidence of the treasure buried within."

Vanessa was also fearlessly outspoken politically. She shared many of her sentiments with her father, who, perhaps because his lifestyle could not bear public scrutiny in that homophobic age, was not overtly political. He had been questioned by the US State Department about his political affiliations while making a movie in the US in 1954 (the infamous McCarthy years), and was not anxious to repeat the experience. In 1960, Vanessa co-starred with him in The Tiger and the Horse, a play about nuclear disarmament, and later participated in sit-ins with the antiwar Committee of 100. She spent a night in jail during one of these protests. Receiving an Oscar for her performance in Julia in 1978, she excoriated both "fascist and racist Nazi Germany" and "Zionist hoodlums." She continues both her work as an actress and her unflinching political activism to this day. Her daughters, Joely Richardson and the late Natasha Richardson, both became actors.

Corin Redgrave

Corin shared both his sister's political beliefs and her talent. Better known in the UK than the US, he starred as  Benedict Arnold in the play The General from America in London, then switched roles to play George Washington when the play moved to New York! He died in 2010 after a long and successful career. One of his children, Jemma Redgrave, is an actress.

Lynn Redgrave

Baby Lynn, while sharing the family talent, had a lifelong struggle with her weight; losing it with the help of  prescribed amphetamines for a role, then putting it back on. Americans know her best for her roles as Georgy Girl in the movie of the same name and as Susan in Tom Jones. Her mother Rachel also appeared in both of these movies. Lynn also acted in the sitcom House Calls, but was fired by the studio for repeatedly disrupting shooting to breastfeed her infant. Her well-known struggles with her weight made her an ideal spokesperson for Weight Watchers. Lynn died of breast cancer in 2010, the same year as her brother.

Donald Spoto is the author of over two dozen biographies of famous people, from Alfred Hitchcock and Jesus to Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe. While he was a personal friend of several of the Redgraves, his treatment of them is even-handedly sympathetic but factual, neither fawning nor malicious. I could have lived without knowing the dates and names of nearly every production that every family member appeared in, but the book also brims with a wealth of extremely personal anecdotes of the several generations of this remarkable family of gifted performers. They greatly enriched the twentieth century performance arts, and with the fourth generation reaching professional maturity, bid fair to do the same for the century to come.

Note: I received a free pre-publication copy of The Redgraves: A Family Epic, for review. It is published by Crown Archetype and will be released on October 2, 2012.

Trailer of Hitchcock thriller, The Lady Vanishes

Book Review of Yunte Huang's Charlie Chan

Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous With American History, by Yunte Huang
Review by guest writer Jeff (Sister Mary Murderous's brother-in-law)

If you have ever gotten immersed in Wikipedia and followed tangentially-related topics until you've nearly forgotten what you originally looked up, you'll be right at home reading Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous With American History (2010) by Yunte Huang.

Huang's book starts out as a biography of Chang Apana, the real-life inspiration for Earl D. Biggers's fictional detective, Charlie Chan. But then the digressions begin. There is a brief history of the Hawaiian islands and the culture of the Hawaiian cowboys, the paniolos. (Chang Apana was a paniolo before he became a bullwhip-carrying member of the Honolulu police force.) There is a sociological exploration of Chinese immigrants that occasionally veers into autobiography.

Then there is a mini-account of the writing career of Earl Derr Biggers, who wrote the six canonical Charlie Chan novels. Biggers, reading Honolulu newspapers in the New York City Public Library, was inspired to create his Charlie Chan character by accounts of Chang Apana's exploits in Honolulu. Biggers and Chang Apana met in person just once, in 1931 during the filming of one of Biggers's novels on location in Honolulu. Both died in 1933.

Next is an interesting section comparing and contrasting good-guy Charlie Chan with the villainous (and equally fictional) Fu Manchu of Sax Rohmer. That leads to a section on the career of Swedish actor Walter Oland who, amazingly, played both characters in Hollywood.

A discussion of the racism and yellow-face portrayals of Asian characters in Hollywood movies leads to a description of the Thalia Massie (purported) rape case in Honolulu in 1931. The accused native Hawaiian suspects in the rape case went free after their trial resulted in a hung jury. Soon afterwards one suspect was murdered and Massie's wealthy mother, Grace Fortescue, and two male Navy acquaintances were found guilty of manslaughter. Their defense was presented by none other than the cash-strapped Clarence Darrow and their sentences of 10 years at hard labor were commuted to one hour served in the custody of the territorial sheriff. The tie-in to Chang Apana is that, one morning outside his Honolulu home, he actually witnessed Grace Fortescue driving the get-away car with the dead body in it, with other Honolulu policemen in hot pursuit.

But wait, there's more! After Walter Oland's death in 1938, the Charlie Chan movie franchise continued with Sidney Toler taking over the part. The author documents Toler's run as Charlie Chan until his death in 1947 and his replacement by Roland Winters, who continued in the role until McCarthyism and the Korean War began to negatively affect the box office business of movies featuring a Chinese hero. The numerous movie sequels and their intriguing supporting players, such as Charlie's children and Stephen Fetchit, are discussed and the author even throws in a brief analysis of The Manchurian Candidate.

This is a fascinating hodgepodge of a book. The Dewey Decimal number assigned to it is 363.2509 (other social problems and services), but only a detective of Charlie Chan's caliber could possibly explain how that classification was chosen.