The Saturday interview: Vanessa Redgrave | From the Guardian | The Guardian - inc Dale Farm

Legendary actor and life-long activist Vanessa Redgrave on bad habits, brother Corin and why the battle for the beleaguered Travellers of Dale Farm matters so much to her

• • reddit this
• Comments (84)

• 
• • Stuart Jeffries
  • The Guardian, Saturday 10 September 2011
  • Article history

'My politics have become rights-based. That’s my duty. I’m pledged to put children before anybody’s politics' … Vanessa Redgrave. Photograph: David Levene

When Corin Redgrave suffered a heart attack while pleading with councillors not to evict Travellers from Dale Farm in Essex in summer 2005, his sister, Vanessa, was thousands of miles away in the US. "If it wasn't for a Traveller giving him mouth to mouth, he would have died," she says. "As it was he had such loss of oxygen to his brain that he had extreme short-term memory loss. Forty Travellers came to the Basildon hospital to pray for him."

So is her current support for the Travellers due to be evicted from Dale Farm later this month to honour her dead brother? "Oh very, very, very much so. The Dale Farm Travellers are inseparable from him for me. It's totally personal. I wouldn't feel I could draw breath or act or anything if I didn't honour Corin and the Dale Farm Travellers."

At the time of her brother's collapse, she was playing Hecuba in Euripides's tragedy of maternal bereavement, while Corin, to whom she was close personally and politically (they were both veterans of the Trotskyist Workers' Revolutionary Party), had been playing the lead in the Globe Theatre's production of Pericles, Prince of Tyre. "I know what happened from Mark Rylance [the Globe's then artistic director] and from Kika Markham [Corin's wife]," she says staring glassily at the book-jammed coffee table in the living room of her west London flat.

Dotted around the room are Redgrave family memorabilia – father Sir Michael Redgrave's bust on a shelf above her Bafta award, a portrait of mother Rachel Kempson next to the book shelves. Vanessa's arrival into the world on January 30 1937 was made public by Laurence Olivier at a performance of Hamlet at the Old Vic, when he announced that Laertes (whom Sir Michael was playing) has a daughter. What an entrance into an acting dynasty: Laertes usually dies childless in act five.

"What was so wonderful about Corin is that he never stinted himself. He never said: 'I've got to save my energy because I've got to give five performances this week'. He'd go and stand up for beleaguered people. I'm so glad that he went to speak up for the Travellers, but I know he put his life on the line. He didn't think of that. I did."

Corin never did wholly recover. He returned to the stage in 2009, dedicating his opening-night performance in Trumbo, a play about the blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter, to Vanessa's daughter Natasha, who had died earlier that week in a skiing accident in Canada. Corin died in April 2010, aged 70, followed a month later by sister Lynn, aged 67, who died of breast cancer. Earlier this week, the Guardian printed a letter from Kika Markham complaining about an article which described Redgrave as an "angel of death" and suggested her recent support for the Dale Farm Travellers would harm their cause. The phrase, Markham wrote, was "crude and insensitive. Vanessa Redgrave knows a lot about angels of death from the last few years, as is well known. The fact that she is still able to fight on behalf of others should be cause for celebration."

I tell Redgrave that David Cameron earlier this week gave his backing to the eviction, saying that the basic issue was of fairness. Everybody – including Travellers – must obey planning laws. Ed Miliband also backed the eviction saying Basildon Council's decision to forcibly evict Travellers from the site on September 19 after 10 years of legal wrangling is justified. "I'm appalled," she says. "It's lamentable what these politicians say."

But aren't Cameron and Miliband right to say the evictions have to take place because some Travellers have flouted planning laws by building on a green-belt site? "It's a total confabulation to say that their eviction would be fair. Their eviction is going to break up a community at a time in Britain when all we see is communities being broken up." How? "Because they haven't been promised another site. The council have said they would provide alternative housing, but those aren't Travellers sites. Houses or bungalows or flats would be dotted around. That would break up the Traveller community."

Vanessa Redgrave shouldn't be giving this interview. Her doctor has told her she may have pneumonia and must rest, and her hacking cough suggests she isn't well. I think of what she's just said about her late brother putting his life on the line. You'd have thought she should reserve her strength for rehearsals for the West End transfer of the Broadway production of Driving Miss Daisy, which opens later this month.

While the photographer sets up, we sip espresso at her kitchen table. Redgrave lights up. "Oh, write about it if you want. But it sets a bad example, and I hate being a bad example. My doctor will be horrified." Her chosen brand is unexpected: American Spirit. "I'm an absolute addict. I only started smoking because I read a newspaper article when I was 24 in which Françoise Sagan was asked what she had for breakfast. What did she have?" Redgrave modulates effortlessly into a husky, sexy voice. "A cup of black of coffee and a Gauloise." Fifty years on, Redgrave is still having that Sagan breakfast – even though it's evening, and even though health-wise she really shouldn't.

I mention that I'm pleased to see she's not living in a slum. According to The House of Redgrave by Tim Adler, published earlier this year and serialised in the Daily Mail, by the turn of the millennium Redgrave had given away so much money she had hardly anything left. "Her home," wrote Adler, "was an unremarkable two-bedroom flat in Hammersmith, West London, [it's in Chiswick] with a bare bulb dangling in the hall." Our best thesp with a bare bulb! A bare bulb for the only British actress to have won Oscar, Bafta, Cannes, Tony, Golden Globe, and Screen Actors Guild awards! For a woman who became a Bafta fellow last year "in recognition of an outstanding and exceptional contribution to film"! Forget the Travellers, let's have a whipround for Vanessa.

"Oh, that book!" says Redgrave. "We took legal action." Adler's book, a lurid romp through Redgrave's seemingly torrid love life, portrayed her as a Trot nutcase who ruined her children's lives. For me the most plausible passage related how, during her dalliance with Timothy Dalton, the lovers had a six-hour row about the meaning of Hamlet's "To be or not to be" monologue. That sounds like our Vanessa.

On the plus side, the Mail serialisation yielded one of my favourite newspaper corrections, namely: "Our serialisation of a forthcoming book about the actress Vanessa Redgrave and her family on 7th May included the allegation that she had once found her husband in bed with her father. We accept that this incident did not take place and we sincerely apologise to Vanessa Redgrave and her family for the distress and embarrassment caused."

Her daughter Joely denounced the Mail and book in the Sunday Telegraph. "Vanessa would be the first to say her politics, or actions, have been misguided at times," she wrote. "But compare a woman who gives the shirt off her back (she does live in a small two-bedroom flat as a result – the book was right about that one) with newspapers or writers who profit from the misery of others … My sister and I have always worried about Vanessa's total selflessness, hence Tasha's very poignant present to mum shortly before she died – a little purse embroidered with 'save for a rainy day'."

"Do you know," says Redgrave. "I once spoke to Martin Luther King on the phone." What did you say? "'I want you to know you're fantastic'. I just burbled my admiration." Redgrave recalls this because the story of Driving Miss Daisy is set during the black civil rights struggle in the US, and traces the relationship of a prejudiced Jewish woman and her African-American chauffeur. "I thought I knew a lot about that period, but I learned a lot from Alfred Uhry [the playwright] and from James [James Earl Jones, who plays Hoke, her driver]. Especially from James. He was born in Mississippi and lived through horrendous racism. He became an actor when the Southern states would not show anything on TV a black American was in." It was little better in Britain, she suggests. "It's a period when the director who was to become my husband [Tony Richardson] had to battle with the BBC to cast a black actor as Othello."

She sees connections between Miss Daisy's prejudice and what she suspects lies behind opposition to the Dale Farm Travellers. "It reminds me of what James said when he heard that the Tea Party wanted to crucify Barack Obama. They attacked him because he's black. The hounding of the Travellers – because that's what it's been – is not dissimilar. Is it because some are Irish? I wouldn't know. Is it because there's a long-standing fear of gypsies and Travellers in the UK? I don't know."

Redgrave shows me the ring she wears on her wedding finger, for Franco Nero, the actor she met when he played Lancelot to her Guinevere in Camelot in 1967, the year she divorced Tony Richardson. In 1969, Vanessa and Franco had a baby called Carlo. Then, after nearly four decades, she and Franco were reunited in an unusual and apparently not legally binding wedding ceremony. That ring was put on her finger by Carlo, now 42. Why is she telling me this? Because it makes her remember Carlo's first nanny. "She was from southern Italy, and thinking about her makes me realise that northern Italians had the same rejection of southern Italians in 1969 as we're getting now in the frenzied anger about gypsies and Travellers. We're certainly in the area of prejudice."

Is it significant for her that in Driving Miss Daisy she plays a Jewish woman, given the allegations of antisemitism she has faced? "I was surprised when I was asked to play Miss Daisy and wondered if I could – only in part because she was Jewish but, also because she was a Southern woman who has hardly opened her mouth before she declares she's not prejudiced, and yet everything she does shows how totally prejudiced she is."

Redgrave was accused of antisemitism before and after the 1978 speech she made at the Oscars. She had just won the best supporting actress award for her performance with Jane Fonda in the film Julia, about a Jewish woman murdered by the Nazis before the war. In the speech, Redgrave rounded on "a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums whose behaviour is an insult to the stature of Jews all over the world, and their great and heroic record of struggle against fascism and oppression".

Why did she use the phrase "Zionist hoodlums"? "I was saying I pledge myself to fight antisemitism and I'm totally opposed to Zionist hoodlums because one had waved a whole lot of dollar bills at a public meeting in Los Angeles at which I wasn't present, saying, 'Who will get rid of a Jew hater?'. So you know, it was a pretty nervous context for the Oscars." There were also protests at her bankrolling and narrating a documentary called The Palestinian, which explored how the Palestinian people have been subjugated in Israel. A cinema in LA showing the documentary was bombed, and her effigy burned.

Have her politics changed since then? I ask because Joely Richardson wrote that her mum voted Lib Dem in the past two elections and would not "call herself a Marxist but a human rights activist". "My politics have become rights-based," says Redgrave. "That's my duty. I'm pledged to put children before the politics of any government, before anybody's politics or my politics. I worry for the children of Dale Farm. I want to ask, 'Why don't you, the council, contact the leaders of the Dale Farm Travellers and say you'd like to come down and talk. You say what you think, and please give your time to listen, especially to the mothers and children.'"

Redgrave won't return to the site soon. "I won't be able to because of this very diminished energy with which I've got to start rehearsals." It's time for me stop diminishing that energy further. Just before she trots off obligingly to have her picture taken, Redgrave says: "Forgive me if I sound pontifical, because I'm nobody really. You should be interviewing bishops, not me. It's just that my name catches attention for all sorts of reasons. It probably shouldn't. "

Driving Miss Daisy opens at the Wyndhams Theatre on September 26. Details: london-theatreland.co.uk

via guardian.co.uk