By Marc Peyser
Natasha Richardson may be the nicest actor I ever interviewed. I met her in 1998, just as she was about to open on Broadway in "Cabaret." She had sung on stage only once before, and she was all too aware that Liza Minnelli owned Sally Bowles just as sure as Liza's mommy owned "Over the Rainbow." "If I stop to think about people comparing me to Liza, I get in a terrible state," she said at the time. "One day in rehearsals someone said, 'She's got to be a little more something.' I became completely frazzled." I wasn't sure which was more surprising: that she was nervous, or that she was willing to admit that she was.
We hung out in the back of the chilly theater for a while, then when we got too cold we went up to her closet-sized dressing room, where we plopped on cushy seats and chatted like old friends. "Tasha," she told me to call her as she made a cup of tea. Of course, that's what celebrities try to do—ingratiate themselves with a reporter to get a nice story. But Richardson seemed incapable of being fake. She was charming, disarming and almost fragile, smoking cigarettes and sharing stories of her boys, her life and how uncomfortable she got when celebrities visited her in her dressing room after the show.
When she opened in "Cabaret," she melted New York's collective hard heart. Instead of wrapping Sally's wounded soul in a Liza-like suit of brash, Richardson let it all hang out. You could feel the pain dripping off her fake eyelashes. She won a Tony for her performance, but I was never sure how much acting she was really doing. Beside the Cockney accent and tarty makeup, her very real and vulnerable take on Sally was much like the very real and vulnerable Tasha I'd met.
Natasha's accessibility was all the more remarkable when you know her pedigree: her mother (Oscar-winning actor Vanessa Redgrave), her father (Oscar-winning director Tony Richardson), her grandfather (British stage legend Sir Michael Redgrave), her aunt (Lynn Redgrave)—and that's not including her uncle, her sister or her husband, Liam Neeson. Compared to the Redgraves, the Barrymores are amateurs. But Natasha would never have let on about all that. At the same time, she wasn't the kind of actress who is so intimidated by her parents' accomplishments that she refuses to acknowledge that they exist. She happily talked about her super-supportive mother—"Her children can do no wrong," she said—and her difficult father, who was a Simon Cowell type, even when critiquing his own family. But on the night she won her award, she thanked them all and dedicated her statue to her father. "It is, after all, a Tony," she said.
The ultimate proof of the un-diva Tasha came as she was walking me downstairs and remembered some people she'd met backstage recently. They were more folks coming for the post-show glad-handing, but she had no idea who they were. It turned out, the feeling was mutual. "I realized what they wanted was to get to meet my husband," she said with a giggle. "At the end of it, they said, 'By the way, you were great.'" My thoughts exactly.
