back to Awards & NomineesThe Inspiration Awards - Vanessa Redgrave

Like Dames Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, Vanessa Redgrave has for decades been one of the UK's finest actresses. And, also like them, she is still feted worldwide as she passes through middle-age, bringing to screen and TV roles an authority and gravitas that younger actresses simply cannot match. First Oscar-nominated back in 1967, she'd still be winning major prizes 35 years later. Ever burning with energy and righteous anger, she continues to dedicate herself to the theatre and cinema, as well as the social causes for which she long fought - causes that have made her, alongside her American counterpart Jane Fonda, the most controversial actress of the modern era.  Which probably explains why, unlike Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, she isn't yet a Dame.

Redgrave's present status was prophesied on the day of her birth by no less a luminary than Sir Laurence Olivier. On January 30th, 1937, during the curtain call of a performance at London's Old Vic Theatre, he announced to the audience "Ladies and gentlemen, tonight a great actress has been born. Laertes has a daughter!" (Laertes being the character played that night by Vanessa's father, the renowned Michael Redgrave). It really wasn't such a wild guess on Olivier's part. Michael was already an esteemed member of the thespian establishment. His father, Roy, starred in many of the first silent films to come out of Australia, while his wife and Vanessa's mother was another famed performer, Rachel Kempson, who'd debuted as Juliet at Stratford in 1932 (she'd met Michael during Liverpool Rep's production of Flowers Of The Forest in 1935 and married him that same year). Indeed, the Redgrave tradition would continue even beyond Vanessa. Vanessa's sister, Lynn, would be Oscar nominated, while her brother Corin would become a prime mover in British theatre. Beyond this, Vanessa's own children - Natasha and Joely Richardson - would become famous actresses, as would her niece, Corin's daughter, Jemma Redgrave.

She decided to take to the stage while in her teens. Attending the all-girls Queensgate School in South Kensington, a quick walk from London's finest museums and parks, her first love had been dance, and she attended the Ballet Rambert School for some eight years. Sadly, she grew too tall to cut it (though her dancing would be employed to great effect in her film career). But persistence was a strong trait in Redgrave. At 16, though gawky, sporting thick spectacles and being riddled with acne, she determined to follow her idol Audrey Hepburn into acting. Despite being told by her mentors that her height would also be held against her in the theatre and she wouldn't be offered a decent part till she reached her thirties, she persisted in learning the craft, in 1954 moving from Queensgate to the Central School of Speech and Drama. Here, though nicknamed Big Van for her gait, she proved an immense success, graduating in 1957 as one of only two winners of the Sybil Thorndike Prize. Olivier was already being proven correct.

On leaving the Central School, Redgrave would move directly to the Frinton Summer Theatre, appearing in numerous plays. 

Redgrave was now past 60 and showing every sign of wanting to experience everything before running out of time, the new millennium seeing her defy sexual boundaries to play Prospero in The Tempest at the Globe. She'd also join Trevor Nunn for The Cherry Orchard at the Cottesloe.

Tennessee Williams called Vanessa Redgrave "the greatest actress of our time" and she has the CV to prove it. She's won Evening Standard awards in four separate decades. She's won Oliviers and Tonys, been Best Actress at Cannes twice. She's been Oscar nominated six times, Emmy-nominated five times, Golden Globe-nominated no fewer than 13 times. Beyond this she's president of International Artists Against Racism and UNICEF's Special Ambassador for the Performing Arts, and a CBE. Still vocal whenever she perceives injustice to have been done, in 2004 she founded the Peace And Progress Party with her brother Corin. This was entirely in keeping with her public demands for an end to the Gulf War back in 1991 (which saw her dropped from a US tour of Lettuce And Lovage produced by her own son-in-law), her attacks on Vladimir Putin over Chechnia and her lambasting of Tony Blair's Labour government over their failure to support the Arts. Redgrave has lived up to Laurence Olivier's grand claims and gone much further. We can only assume she will continue for many years to come.