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By Steven Hardy
NATASHA Richardson has it all: husband, children, and career - not to mention beauty and brains.
She's the Princess Royal of the dramatic Redgrave dynasty and, during the Spring, 1998, theatrical season, she and Liam Neeson were the golden couple of Broadway as she was starring as Sally Bowles in the revival of Cabaret while he was playing Oscar Wilde in The Judas Kiss.
Instead of resting on her laurels, she has a new movie, The Parent Trap, a remake of 1961's Hayley Mills family classic. She and Dennis Quaid play divorced parents whose identical twin daughters, who were separated shortly after birth by the break-up of the marriage, devise schemes to reunite them and rekindle their romance.
"It's a real challenge for me," she says. "It's the best kind of Hollywood romantic comedy, a throwback to the comedies of Cary Grant and Carole Lombard." The story is a wish-fulfilment fantasy that Richardson says she never indulged in when her own parents, actress Vanessa Redgrave and film director Tony Richardson, separated when she was three.
"I don't remember them splitting up," she confesses. "I mean, I don't remember them really being together. They were always friends and they remained that way, continuing to work together the way they always did. That was wonderful. It was never an issue of being torn between parents."
In the picture-perfect movie, Richardson plays a renowned wedding gown designer who lives in London, while Quaid is the dreamboat dad who owns a lush vineyard in California's Napa Valley.
"This is Hollywood at its best," smiles Richardson. "This is not the real world. This is a movie about people with dream jobs who live in dream locations. I play this Englishwoman, so I have a butler and sit down for silver service tea every day. I have a Bentley and a chauffeur and I live in this extraordinary house near Harrods. The bridal gowns? They're all Vera Wang.
"When I read the script, I just thought it was funny and romantic. I liked it."
Film-makers Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer wanted an English actress to play the wife role, and Natasha Richardson was the first person they met with.
"I was very taken with her femininity," recalls Meyers. "Natasha has tremendous elegance and a kind of charisma that you don't see very often any more. She had a contemporary quality yet she has a lovely, somewhat old-fashioned screen presence. There's also a real softness to her as a person which is perfect for her character in the film."
Natasha has acting in her blood. Not only does she have famous parents but she is also a granddaughter of the great Shakespearean actor Sir Michael Redgrave and his actress wife Rachel Kempson, niece of both Corin and Lynn Redgrave, cousin of Jemma Redgrave, and sister of Joely Richardson.
"In my family, there was a definite feeling of 'The show must go on and do your job and be professional.' But there are times when you see people behaving so-called 'badly' and, surprisingly, it gets results. It gets them the space and the time they need to do their work properly.
"I'm wary about being too judgmental on that issue. Sometimes you don't serve yourself well to always say 'I'll do it, and I'm not going to question.' Have you ever heard that expression 'Meat Puppet'? Well, that's what actors are sometimes in the movies. They're meat puppets. It's horrible."
"In film acting, what appears on the screen is ultimately always the director's vision," she continues, "and that's who you have to go with and trust when you're making a movie."
Not that Natasha Richardson hasn't thought about directing. "I have considered it," she says evenly, "but I don't think that's for me. I think I'd be a good producer. I can think about a lot of things at the same time, and I think ahead, and I like to take care of people and be sure they're okay."
Although she was a flower girl at the age of four in her mother's on-screen wedding in The Charge of the Light Brigade, directed by her father, she made her feature film debut as Mary Shelley in Ken Russell's Gothic, then played the title role in Paul Schrader's Patty Hearst with a flawless American accent.
Her other film credits include The Handmaid's Tale, a psychosexual shocker; A Month in the Country with Kenneth Branagh; Fat Man and Little Boy with Paul Newman; The Comfort of Strangers with Rupert Everett; and Widow's Peak, a romantic mystery comedy set in Ireland, in which she worked with Mia Farrow.
"I hope you're not going to write how glamorous it was to grow up in my family," Richardson says. "I'm so sick of reading this stuff which is so far from the truth. People somehow seem to have equated coming from a professional acting family with coming from aristocracy. That's far from the truth.
"My family consists of people who work and work hard. They work from the age of 17 to almost when they die. They're used to going from glamorous locations, staying in four-star hotels, to being in some God-forsaken theatre in the back of beyond, living in a simple bed-and-breakfast. Part of my life has been glamorous and part of it has been incredibly un-glamorous, compared to other middle-class professional families. My family had a healthy respect for chasing success, coupled with a very strong work ethic."
Add to that a healthy dose of respect for American dramatic training.
Unlike most British actresses, she embraces the Method school. "At drama school in London, I mentioned Stanislavsky one day, and it was as if I'd spoken the word of the devil!" she groans.
Her grandfather, Sir Michael, however, was one of the few English actors of the Olivier/Gielgud generation to admire the Method; in fact, he wrote a book about it.
"Did you know my great-grandfather Redgrave was a strolling player who worked his way around Australia playing in something called Bush Melodramas?" she inquires.
Natasha Richardson has been married twice. In 1990, she married producer Robert Fox, whose brothers are actors Edward and James Fox. Then, on July 3, 1994, shortly after divorcing Fox, she married actor Liam Neeson. The actors met in January, 1993, when they co-starred in the Broadway production of Anna Christie.
Then came Liam Neeson's Oscar-winning role in Schindler's List. "That changed everything for us," Richardson says. "It's been a whirlwind time. It was a lot for both of us." Liam Neeson became one of Hollywood's hottest leading men at the same time she went from independent working woman to being pregnant and part of his entourage.
"I always swore I would never go to the Academy Awards until I was nominated myself," she admits, "but I had to make an exception in his case."
Nevertheless, after three years of tagging along to Neeson's movie sets and having two babies, she became very restless. "I was losing confidence in myself and I was growing a bit tired of being on the Liam Neeson roadshow," she says, even though her travels included lots of trips to London, where Neeson shot Les Misérables and the prequel to Star Wars.
People always ask me about that," she notes with some impatience. "Liam plays this Jedi Master, somebody who I guess is a cross between Han Solo and Obi Wan Kenobi. I get confused who is who. Luke Skywalker maybe."
Natasha and Liam have two sons, Michael, born in June, 1995, and Daniel, born in August, 1996. Five months after she had Michael, she discovered she was pregnant again. "It sure wasn't planned that way," she laughs.
"I love having my babies, but being pregnant - I don't think there's anything romantic about it at all. Plus there's that weight legacy that's hard to get rid of. One day I'd love a little girl. You get to buy all the cute clothes!"
The two divide their time between their country home and their apartment on Central Park West and try to split their jobs so one of them is always at home, even though they have a nanny.
"It's a great plus being an actor," she says. "In our profession, there are long periods of time when we get to be with the kids more than most parents who go to work every day. But sometimes you don't see them enough. It busts me up."
Natasha Richardson and Liam Neeson have worked together in one film, Jodie Foster's Nell, about a mysterious Appalachian woman raised in a remote cabin in North Carolina, speaking a strange, impenetrable language. But they are looking for other projects. "When you are in love and you work together, people try to destroy you. Our philosophy is that we have something special, we can't blow it. So we have to be choosy. If it's a project that we're both right for, then - okay."
They have plans for a second movie project based on the Patrick McGrath novel Asylum. Neeson will play a seductive accused killer, while she'll play the adulterous wife of the asylum's chief physician.
"Liam's so sick of being so noble and so nice on-screen," she laughs. "He's eager to play a psychopath."
So what motivates this woman who has everything? "Stardom or money or fame have not been the thing that drives me," she muses. "I think the only thing in common in what I've done is that I've always played great parts.
"I have chosen to maybe do a great part in a smaller movie rather than do a not-so-good part in a big movie. I would like to have as much choice as possible. It's a tedious cliché at this point, but there just isn't that much great material for women today. There just isn't."
So, what doesn't Natasha Richardson have that she's always yearned for? An Academy Award. "What's taking it so long?" she asks.
