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July 31, 1998
Features

Eight times a week in Broadway's smash revival of Cabaret, Natasha Richardson evokes a moment of overwhelming misery as Sally Bowles, the Weimar-era Berlin chanteuse whose fast life of cocaine and coitus is interrupted by an unwanted pregnancy--most probably the result of a liaison with a bisexual roommate played by John Benjamin Hickey. Near the end of the show, Richardson-as-Sally walks shakily onto the stage and reveals that she has had an abortion. She paints an unflinching portrait of denial, regret, and despair: the knocking knees, the tremulous voice, the vacant stare.

"I wanted to find out what it would've been like, what the health risks would have been, and the pain level," says Richardson, who tracked down a contact whose father performed abortions during that time, and soaked up stories about the emotional and physical perils. But not all of Richardson's preparation works from the outside in. Her Tony-winning reinterpretation of Sally Bowles (hardly the glamour-puss rendered by Liza Minnelli in the 1972 movie) has loose but unmistakable parallels to her own life as well.

Given the five-year marriage of her mother, Vanessa Redgrave, to film director Tony Richardson, who died of complications from the AIDS virus in 1991, there's something strikingly nervy in Natasha's nightly exploration of the limits of gay-straight unions. She says her family history "resonates in all sorts of ways, some of which I'm aware of, some of which I'm not. I mean, my dad never said to me, 'I'm gay,' or 'I'm bisexual.' Yet it was never a hidden thing. I don't know, is that denial or total openness?"

As an actress, Richardson has always gravitated toward the dark side--like Paul Schrader's 1988 biopic, Patty Hearst, in which she spent much of her time blindfolded and at gunpoint, and 1991's The Comfort of Strangers, as a woman caught in a sadomasochistic endgame. "It's the light, bright parts I have to work at," says Richardson, 35, nestling into a pre theater lunch at one of the few Manhattan restaurants that allow her to light up her treasured Vogue cigarettes. "It's weird, but where I'm comfortable going is where the most emotionally painful stuff is. That's where I feel a connection I can channel into."

How the devil, then, did she wind up in The Parent Trap, a frothy affair (opening at malls everywhere July 29) in which she plays a picture-perfect divorced mum to cute twin girls (both played by Lindsay Lohan) determined to reunite her with Dennis Quaid's dear, hunky old dad? Well, mainly because a funny thing happened on the way to Cabaret.

Back in the spring of 1997, Richardson was set to begin a battery of vocal and terpsichorean lessons for the musical when director Sam Mendes' favored theater suddenly fell through. It was the start of several months' bad luck. "Did you ever have one of those moments when everything professionally just goes boom?" she asks, with a blunt sincerity miles away from typical Hollywood bravado.

It wasn't just the Cabaret revival that blew up in Richardson's face, which she'd kept more or less out of public view from 1994 to 1997; during that time she conceived two sons (Micheal, now 3, and Daniel, 1) with husband Liam Neeson, 46. Anxious to get off the mommy track, she wound up grinding her gears. As Cabaret languished for a year, she lost a movie deal, then a play.

That's when husband and wife moviemakers Charles Shyer and Nancy Meyers (the writing-producing-directing team behind Baby Boom and Father of the Bride) threw Richardson a lifeline. They wanted her for the Parent Trap role Maureen O'Hara played opposite Hayley Mills (and Hayley Mills) in the 1961 original. Typically, what intrigued Richardson most wasn't the family-comedy patina; it was a comic sequence wherein the nervous ex-wife arrives on her former hubby's California wine-country turf totally blotto. "It's so hard not to do [the scene] as a cliche, that's the challenge," she says. She could also relate to the let's-get-back-together theme: "I remember thinking when I was 7 or 8, If I save up all my pocket money and send red roses to my mother, pretending they're from my dad, would that do the trick?"

To Meyers' surprise, though, Richardson had reservations about the twins-separated-at-birth scenario that drives the entire plot. "Natasha had never seen the original movie," says Meyers, who directed the remake, "so when she read our version of it, it was a brand-new issue for her. But y'know, she [ultimately] got it. She understood it's a fable."

Still, it's a fable Richardson sometimes scratched her head at. "What kind of a mother FedExes one of the twins off to Napa and says, 'It's okay, I'll never see you again'?" Richardson asks, crinkling her nose. "You'll never see a bead of sweat in [Meyers-Shyer] movies, either. Everything has to be--even the sheets on the bed, the flowers--every little detail is sort of your dream of what life should be like. At first I was a little resistant to it."

Still, the shoot was geographically advantageous. While Richardson did her initial scenes on a London soundstage last summer, hubby Liam was filming nearby, playing a Jedi in George Lucas' top secret Star Wars prequel, due next May. "He's some sort of Jedi Master, I know, but I get confused as to which one." So much for any plot-point dish.

On Aug. 2, Neeson will close his current Broadway run as Oscar Wilde in The Judas Kiss, the same date Richardson bids adieu to her limited engagement as Sally Bowles. Cabaret, however, will go on with Jennifer Jason Leigh; a touring company may also be formed with Anne Heche taking up the torch-song baton. "I must say, Jennifer's a great idea, but it breaks my heart...that this show is going on without me," Richardson confesses. "It's a horrible feeling. You think, Oh, I'm replaceable. I thought I was...what made this special."

She and Neeson may star together in Asylum, a dramatic thriller that would put her back in dire straits. She'd play the adulterous wife of a doctor at a mental institution; Neeson would play her lover, who's been incarcerated since killing his spouse. "I've had the opportunity on stage to play some incredible women," says Richardson. "But I feel I haven't had that part on film yet. I hope this is that part."

Not that Broadway's current leading light is excessively optimistic. "I don't think any actor believes anything until you're standing in front of the cameras shooting. There's a long way to go in film between the idea and the execution, you know. It's always scary." Yes, but as Sally Bowles might put it, it's better than sitting alone in your room.