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From Broadway's 'Cabaret' to Disney's 'Parent Trap,' she does more than 'show up for the check

LOS ANGELES - With a serious film resume and a theater career that just keeps becoming more and more distinguished, you could forgive Natasha Richardson a little bit of snobbishness. Factor in her pedigree - Dad was Oscar-winning director Tony Richardson (''Tom Jones''), Mom is acting legend Vanessa Redgrave, and her husband, Liam Neeson, is considered one of the most admired and attractive leading men around - and it's hard to conceive of the radiant Englishwoman doing anything, well, common.

That kind of thinking gives her a good laugh.

''It's funny, but it kind of drives me nuts,'' she says of the whole acting-royalty idea. ''It has these connotations of huge wealth and privilege and aristocratic attitudes. But it's like, no; working actors, do you know what I mean? Sometimes actors do a movie and make a lot of money, then they're in the theater for a year and make no money at all.

''So, you know, workers.''

Got it. Still, in short, feathered blond hair and a stunning black bolero jacket and cocktail dress ensemble, Richardson reminds you of no one so much as the late Princess Diana. She does have an accessible, unpretentious quality, though. That may not be so apparent in her knockout, Tony Award-winning portrayal of Sally Bowles in the in-your-face Broadway revival of ''Cabaret,'' which Richardson exits Aug. 2. But it's evident throughout her latest movie, a Disney remake of the 1961 gimmick comedy ''The Parent Trap.''

A mainstay of weekend afternoon television, ''Trap'' is hardly sophisticated. Yet the picture (which starred Hayley Mills as twin sisters who scheme to reunite their divorced parents, played by Brian Keith and Maureen O'Hara) exerts an almost primal allure, especially in how it exploits youthful empowerment fantasies and many kids' dreams of creating ideal families.

The new version is made by Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer, the husband-and-wife team responsible for the successful ''Father of the Bride'' remakes. It stars Richardson as the London-dwelling mother, a designer of wedding gowns named Elizabeth James, and Dennis Quaid as the father Nick Parker, a California vintner. Newcomer Lindsay Lohan plays their preteen twin daughters, all-American Hallie Parker and very British Annie James, who meet accidentally after being separated at birth by their divorced folks, raised on different continents, and never informed of their absent parent and sibling's existence.

Of course, they quickly cook up a plot to get Mom and Dad back together.

Troubled family dynamics, yes, but hardly Eugene O'Neill (Richardson and Neeson fell in love while co-starring in the Broadway revival of ''Anna Christie'' five years ago). But even though she admits that working with Lindsay-multiplying computer-graphics tricks is as strange for her as implausible plot coincidences and character motivations, the 35-year-old Richardson had no trouble getting into the ''Parent Trap'' spirit.

''My work, generally speaking, is about rooting for the truth,'' she says. ''So there were aspects of this that jarred with me, like this woman FedExing one of her twins off with no emotional difficulty. But you know, I love those old Hollywood movies with Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn and Irene Dunne. I love them and admire them. I find comedy very difficult; it's hard work to make it seem effortless and light. So those were the challenges to me in this piece. It wasn't like I just showed up for the check; I put every piece of commitment and empathy into this that I would into anything else.''

''Parent Trap'' collaborators confirm that Richardson was fully engaged with the project.

''Natasha is incredibly game,'' director Meyers says. ''Extremely eager, not intimidating, had great ideas, and helped me with the dialogue throughout the movie. She even coached Lindsay on her English accent.''

''And she was really calm,'' 11-year-old Lohan remembers. ''She really made me feel comfortable making my first movie.''

That came quite naturally. Herself the mother of two young boys, Richardson is as devoted to homemaking as she is fiercely committed to her profession and happily spends her spare time cooking and gardening at the family's upstate New York farm.

Even though the original ''Parent Trap'' had never so much as blipped onto Richardson's personal cultural radar, she certainly understands its appeal. Her father and mother divorced when Natasha was 3, and she confesses to fantasies of bringing them back together.

The parents made a point, however, of maintaining cordial relations until Tony Richardson's death in 1991. Nevertheless, Natasha and her sister Joely certainly grew up culture-shocked, if not more deeply traumatized, due to the breakup.

''Mine was an unusual childhood by any standards,'' Richardson understates. ''It was almost schizophrenic, due to the two very different worlds that my mom and my dad lived in. He lived in the Hollywood Hills in a beautiful house with tropical birds and swimming pools and famous guests coming in and out. My mother lived, by choice, a very reduced lifestyle in London, and politics for a number of years took her away from us for long periods.''

But absorbed as she was in radical leftist causes, Vanessa Redgrave made sure that her children felt special.

''They both had such huge love for us, wanted us to be the very best for ourselves and always treated us as important individuals right from an early age,'' Richardson says of her parents. ''I've known other children of big show business families who are quite crippled by those ghosts that they bear on their backs. But for some reason, although we had a very rough time of it for many years, we escaped that.

''I think that was due to the sense of self-esteem both of them instilled. And fun. My mother always had such a great sense of imagination and play. The fact that she took such strong political stands was really hard on us as kids, but at the same time, now I am so grateful that I was constantly made aware that most people in the world are not in the privileged position that we are in. I'm trying to make sure that my boys learn the same lesson.''

Despite the great affection she has for her family, Richardson says it's still a struggle to maintain a separate, professional identity. One of the reasons she's happier living in New York than London is that the British just can't get past the dynasty thing that goes back through some four generations of acting Redgraves and, these days, includes aunts, uncles, cousins, and her sister.

''I don't know if it's a genetic disposition,'' she says with a shrug. ''Often, kids rebel and don't want to go into the family business. But it wasn't that way for me; I was inspired by it since I was a little kid. There have been moments when I've thought I wanted something much more routine and domesticated, but no; in that sense, I guess it's in the blood.

''But it's not easy,'' she adds emphatically. ''I mean, now it's OK, but it wasn't easy when I was starting out. I felt so self-conscious about it. People put a spotlight on you at a point in your career when you're not ready for it and are making comparisons with somebody who's at the pinnacle of their profession. You're also concerned about charges of nepotism, people thinking you've got some kind of leg up.''

Despite these concerns, Richardson proved herself quite early on in Shakespeare roles at the Young Vic and as Nina in a 1986 production of Chekhov's ''The Seagull,'' for which she won a London Drama Critics Award for most promising newcomer. Her movie debut came that same year, in Ken Russell's artsy freakout ''Gothic.'' Most of her other film appearances - ''Patty Hearst,'' ''The Comfort of Strangers,'' ''The Handmaid's Tale,'' ''A Month in the Country'' - have been in American independents or literate British dramas.

The kudos for ''Cabaret,'' however, signal not only that Richardson has emerged from the family's shadow, but that she's far more versatile than we, or even she, might have imagined. The new production of the Kander and Ebb classic, set in a seedy nightclub in 1930s Berlin, requires Richardson to sing and dance as chanteuse Sally Bowles, and to interact with the audience in a riskier way than any previous stage Sally has.

''It's very special,'' she says. ''It's designed so the theater audience is the audience at the Kit Kat Klub. You're very close - there's no more of that churchlike division where you and the audience can't interact. It breaks that wall down so people get really involved in the story, which is very raw and raunchy, but also focuses more on the political aspect of the approaching Holocaust. So it's this amazing, fabulous, fun time, but it's also upsetting.''

If Richardson is at the height of her profession, she still has no intention of getting all snooty about it. Consider her humble response to winning the Tony Award.

''I felt like, ooh, I worked for this, but do I really deserve it?'' she says. ''I heard some of those ladies sing at the Tony Awards who can really sing, and I thought, `I can't do that - I don't know if I should really be in their company.'

''Strangely enough, [winning] doesn't make you feel like `top of the world' immediately; in fact, it made me feel vulnerable. Awards are not what you do this for, and when you see really great work that goes unacknowledged, you have to question how much it really means.''

Now there's a practical, working actor's point of view. As is this:

''On the other hand, it's always better to get it than not,'' Richardson says with a throaty laugh.