The actress Joely Richardson is sitting in a central London hotel suite in a black lacy top and black leather culottes (she can’t remember who designed them), a look of surprised sadness on her elegant features. She has just retrieved a long-buried memory from 2009 of the days after the news her older sister, Natasha, also an actress, was in hospital in New York after a freak skiing accident.
Richardson was in London filming the BBC drama The Day of the Triffids when she heard her sister had slipped and banged her head during a beginner’s lesson. “It was the weirdest thing,” she says softly and very slowly, but with the familiar, full-bodied timbre of her Redgrave ancestry (mother Vanessa, uncle Corin, aunt Lynn, grandfather Sir Michael). “We didn’t know it was going to be the end. Work released me — I was covered for insurance for a few days. I grabbed a tiny bag and jumped on the plane to New York. As a result, I didn’t have any clothes or anything with me.”
Natasha, or Tash as her family called her, died two days later, aged 45. “So when it came to the funeral I had to borrow clothes and shoes of Tash’s, because I didn’t have anything of my own,” says Richardson. “I was suddenly aware I was speaking to people in the church wearing my sister’s shoes and it was just terrible, awful, devastating. And then, of course, on a different level I had to step into them.”
Richardson, 59, and her sister grew up in the shadow of huge talent. Maternal Redgraves aside, their father was Tony Richardson, the pioneering director of films such as Look Back in Anger and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.
Despite the glamorous lineage, their childhood sounds pretty grim. Their parents divorced after Tony went off with the actress Jeanne Moreau, when Richardson was a baby. He relocated first to France, then Los Angeles, where he died of an Aids-related illness aged 63 in 1991. Richardson was by his bedside.
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She’d always been a daddy’s girl, relations with her mother having been tricksy. Redgrave combined acting with being an active member of the Trotskyite Workers Revolutionary Party, variously standing bail for Guantanamo inmates, expressing support for Chechen separatists, the IRA and the Palestine Liberation Organisation and more or less ending her Hollywood career by referring to “Zionist hoodlums” in her best supporting actress acceptance speech at the 1978 Academy Awards.
When I interviewed Redgrave in 2010 she admitted, “I wish that I hadn’t spent so much time on politics now.” Back then, she was often absent from the family’s semi in unglamorous Hammersmith, west London (she gave nearly everything she earned to worthy causes), something all her children admitted at various times caused “anger”. When she was there, she dragged them to boring political meetings in cold church halls, rather than allowing them to play with their friends.
Tash, two years her sister’s senior, became Richardson’s “safeguard”. “The family dynamic when we were growing up was that Tash had always been the very brilliant coper, manager. I was the wild tomboy, climbing trees, playing tennis. She was the domestic goddess. We rarely saw Mum, so she’d be busy, filling the fridge, doing all the cooking. Me and my brother Carlo [Redgrave’s son, now 54, with her second husband, the director Franco Nero] did the washing-up.”
The roles continued into adulthood. Tash married the actor Liam Neeson and had two sons, Micheál, 28, and Daniel, 27. “She became our matriarch, a great matriarch.”
But after her death, Richardson, divorced from her husband, the film producer Tim Bevan, with a daughter Daisy, now 31, became the family’s rudder overnight, keeping everyone on course.
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“It didn’t come to me easily,” she says. “It was a very strange transition that took years to happen. I wasn’t doing it consciously. I was just getting on with it as anyone does when someone dies and the family absolutely goes into crisis. It wasn’t just about children being left without a mother. It was about the ramifications for me. I hadn’t lived a day of my life without Tash. I didn’t know the world without her.”
Yet 15 years on, the extended family is locked into its new groove. “It took me about five years to get over the shock and trauma and horror of when we lose people we didn’t imagine losing, when it’s not the natural cycle. But now we’ve had a decade of this new life and I feel we’ve done really well. It’s become second nature.”
Richardson looks unnervingly similar to her mother, both angular and willowy (she is 5ft 10in) with cheekbones that could grate parmesan and piercing, slightly exophthalmic eyes that give an aura of daunting regality.
In person, she is friendly and engaged, talking in convoluted, thoughtful sentences and avoiding platitudes.
The impression is of someone who took a while to find herself, but in this past decade has firmly arrived. “In our thirties and forties we’re still out in the world, struggling, coping with everything because we have families, but also finding our identities,” Richardson says. “Turning 50, there was a little bridge to get over, but the minute you’re over the bridge, there’s a reset. You’re like, oh my God, absolute freedom. This is fabulous.”
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It is unsurprising that Richardson has struggled to establish her own identity. Nepo baby wasn’t a term when she was growing up, but being the daughter of two huge names came with obvious advantages but almost certainly more downsides, as constant comparisons were made with the wider family.
Politically, she felt guilty for not having strong opinions (she has described herself as “passive political”). Professionally, meanwhile, it would have been almost impossible to live up to her mother, who was lauded by the playwrights Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams as the greatest actor of their time.
In her teens, Richardson attempted to dodge expectations by announcing she wanted to be a tennis player and spent a couple of years at a tennis academy in Florida. “I was very enthusiastic, but I was never very good,” she says.
She could no longer avoid the family business, so won a place at Rada and at first seemed on track for heavyweight prestige. She bagged an early role in Peter Greenaway’s Drowning by Numbers, as well as various parts at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Since then, her career has been a rollercoaster. There have been heavyweight Chekhovian Broadway roles. There have also been a lot of films, such as King Ralph or My Dad’s Christmas Date. “It’s all been happenstance,” she says. “I’ve just been led in directions that I wasn’t expecting.”
At 27, she married Bevan, the producer of Love Actually and Bridget Jones’s Diary, and had Daisy. Six weeks after the birth she started filming Ken Russell’s BBC version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in which she played the eponymous lady with a perpetual expression of astonishment as she was ravished by Sean Bean’s Mellors. After that, she retreated into domesticity. “I was married, a mum, a housewife,” she says. “I was so young, but I felt like a grown adult. It was later I did the youth bit. My 30th birthday was a real turning point.”
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She does not speak about Daisy, who inevitably studied acting, at the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute in New York and has since had a smattering of parts, except to say, “She’s the most inspirational person I know.” She would have liked more children. “I tried and it didn’t work. I lost quite a few pregnancies.”
In 2001, she and Bevan divorced. They had been separated for a while and it all got a bit tabloidy. She wore a backless gold Matthew Williamson dress to the premiere of her film Maybe Baby that earned her an It girl tag. She had a fling with Robbie Williams and had a two-year on-off relationship with the TV presenter Jamie Theakston.
In 2002, she relocated to Los Angeles to star as Julia McNamara, “a posh wife part”, in Nip/Tuck, at the time the most watched cable show in the US, about shenanigans at a plastic surgery centre. It started off fabulously with Julia flushing her daughter’s pet gerbil down the lavatory and ended in 2010, like many long-running shows, plain preposterously. Richardson admits she did not watch the later seasons, but she became a household name in the US and earned good money.
After Tash’s death — “tired and done in”, both personally and professionally — she changed gear again with “the stage years”, acting in the West End and on/off Broadway, where she played the poet Emily Dickinson in a two-hour one-woman show to excellent reviews.
Now, a decade on and on the verge of turning 60, Richardson has veered off in another direction, bagging a string of television roles playing slightly grotesque, middle-aged women. It is a path she is relishing. “I’ve obviously entered the pantomime dame stage of my career,” she says. “And I should be so lucky! Turns out that was my destiny — getting to play comedy and these really hyper roles. It feels so rewarding to be playing a grand assortment of people, rather than [being asked], ‘Does she look right in this dress?’ ”
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Many will have seen her in Netflix’s smash adaptation of the novel One Day in which she plays Helen, the ghastly mother of Dex’s girlfriend, Sylvie, urging Dex to play a violent game of Are You There, Moriarty?. “Oh, Helen’s a right number,” she says with a chuckle.
Soon she will appear in the Disney+ series Renegade Nell, about a 19th-century highwaywoman. Her character’s name, Lady Eularia Moggerhanger, tells you all you need to know about the seriousness of the part. She fitted both roles around days on the set of another Netflix series, The Gentlemen, a spin-off of Guy Ritchie’s 2019 film of the same name, about a young man (The White Lotus’s Theo James) who inherits a stately home only to find his father had been leasing land to drug lords to grow cannabis, which leads to a battle for control of the empire.
It is cheeky chappie, caper-ish, very British stuff and features Ritchie regulars Ray Winstone as a crime boss and Vinnie Jones as the estate’s gamekeeper. “I describe it as Downton Abbey put in a blender with Peaky Blinders,” Richardson says. She plays Lady Sabrina, a more raddled version of One Day’s Helen, who may or may not be oblivious to the nefarious activities all around her. “She’s a lot more wily than we initially think.”
Richardson relished the laughter on the set of The Gentlemen. “There were so many years when [work] was all so serious,” she says. “Even the Nip/Tuck years, you’d go into work and there’d be on-screen screaming arguments. Then there was Chekhov, Shakespeare. Urgh.”
Now, she is making it clear, she wants more fun. “Now it’s only a year until I’m 60. I don’t feel that old, but you’re definitely on the descent. I don’t know how much time I have left. It’s not about being a martyr. I have a big extended family I’m very, very connected with and whom I love and adore, but I’m more conscious of how I use time and optimising all my energy and concentration levels on being selfish, doing things I want to do.”
She will not say if she is in a relationship, only that she shares her home with two other people she won’t identify. After all the years of resentment, she sees a lot of Redgrave, now 87, who lives just a couple of miles away from her. Her Instagram is packed with shots of them laughing together, but filial exasperation is not far from the surface.
“I love my mother,” she says. “She’s a great and challenging friend.” Richardson stops this encomium and starts to laugh. “She’s an inspiration and she’s a pain in the arse — but please, don’t take that quote in isolation. I think all family relationships have all colours. It’s never like, ooh, we get along and we bake cakes. We’ll have a great big barney and then we’ll be like children laughing on the grass.”
They frequently spend weekends together at Richardson’s Surrey pad and locked down together during the pandemic. “Yeah,” she says with a meaningfully raised eyebrow. “God, I was ready to move on from that.”
I saw Redgrave two years ago at the London Coliseum where she was playing Mrs Higgins in My Fair Lady. She quit the run a month early after catching Covid. Did Richardson feel proud at the sight of her 85-year-old mother hobbling on a stick across that huge stage? She pulls a face that clearly says no. “How did I feel?” she muses. “I felt protective.”
She pauses, then continues, “When I look at my mother, I see these absolute giants — it’s having gone through the war as a child. Angela Lansbury had it too. They just go on and do it and no one’s allowed to say, ‘Is this sensible?’ Their extraordinary spirit bounces on. Even when they are ailing or frail, they still get up. Something like chutzpah drives them through. I find that inspiring. If I ever have half my mother’s spirit, oh my God, I will be happy.”
The Gentlemen is on Netflix from March 7
