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Joely Richardson interview: ‘My mother gave away everything she owned’

Doing her own thing: Joely Richardson - Contour by Getty
Doing her own thing: Joely Richardson - Contour by Getty

Any interview with Joely Richardson will inevitably circle round to the subject of her famous parents, Vanessa Redgrave and the director Tony Richardson, who died in 1991, as well as her beloved late sister, the actress Natasha, who died following a skiing accident in 2009.

“When I first started out, I didn’t like people talking about my family, partly because people always assumed what my life was like, yet they had no idea,” she tells me. “Everyone thinks we had this lavish lifestyle [Joely and Natasha spent their teenage years in Florida] but actually my mother gave away everything she had when we were growing up, so that wasn’t true at all.”

And now? “I’ve gone through a whole journey with it. I’ve got to the point where I think, well, they are my family. I’m not going to be funny or chippy about it because they are people I love and admire. If my career isn’t up to theirs that’s really fine. I’m very happy doing my own little thing.”

I am speaking to Richardson over Zoom and immediately she laughs at the less than professional environs of my daughter’s bedroom. “Ha ha, that toy dangling from the bed looks like a hanging body,” she says. “That’s quite apt, actually, given what we are talking about.”

Indeed: we’ve met to discuss her new Channel 4 series, Suspect. She stars alongside James Nesbitt as an emotionally inscrutable pathologist, Jackie, involved in the case of a teenager, Christina, who has apparently hanged herself. Nesbitt plays a detective who discovers in the first few scenes that the girl lying on the slab is his semi-estranged daughter and, refusing to believe she would have killed herself, sets out to prove foul play.

Vanessa Redgrave with her daughters, Joely (left) and Natasha - Bettmann Archive
Vanessa Redgrave with her daughters, Joely (left) and Natasha - Bettmann Archive

I tell Richardson the episode is one of the most harrowing things I’ve ever seen on TV. “I can’t imagine how Imogen [King, who plays Christina] felt lying on that slab,” she continues. “Your mind can definitely be affected by what you are filming. I once played Marie Antoinette [in 2001’s The Affair of the Necklace] and when I put my head on the slab I was convinced the safety catch would slip, ha ha.”

The 57-year-old Richardson laughs a lot. It could be nerves or it could be a way of maintaining a distance from interviews that will inevitably circle at some point to that famous dynasty. She is easy to talk to, though, and not at all precious. She recently starred in the bonkers-sounding Nicolas Cage horror flick, Color Out of Space, and asks me whether I saw it, before immediately saying, “no, no, you probably haven’t, ha ha. I did thank the producer for casting me as Nic’s wife though – not so long ago that role would have gone to someone 20 years younger. Although at the same time I’m also having to get used to the fact I no longer play the sorts of roles I used to, being an older woman. There’s definitely a personal adjustment going on.”

This brings us swifter than expected to Netflix’s upcoming remake of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, starring The Crown’s Emma Corrin as Constance Chatterley, who gets famously frisky with the gamekeeper Mellors among the forget-me-nots, and in which Richardson plays the housekeeper Mrs Bolton. Nearly 30 years ago, Richardson starred as Constance opposite Sean Bean in Ken Russell’s well regarded four-part TV adaptation, which made a virtue of the novel’s sexual realism, not to mention Bean’s pert posterior. How do the two versions differ?

“Well, with this one we’ve got a woman [Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre] directing, for one thing. And of course you now have people on set to say what’s ok and what’s not. In the old days you were simply told to ‘manage’.” We both try to imagine the famously uncompromising Russell working with an intimacy coordinator.

“I loved Ken but we went through a right journey on that film,” says Richardson with a squeal of laughter. “One day we had a big fight, a difference of opinion over something technical, and straight away afterwards I had to do this highly vulnerable sex scene. Those were such different days in the film industry. There was nothing like the protection you have now. And anyway my father would always say, ‘It’s the director’s vision, do what the director says.’ Which is true.”

Richardson opposite Sean Bean in Ken Russell’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover - Alamy
Richardson opposite Sean Bean in Ken Russell’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover - Alamy

Richardson, who lives alone in west London and has a 30-year-old daughter, Daisy, with her former husband, the film producer Tim Bevan, comes across as pretty resilient. Over a four-decade career across film, stage and TV, has she ever encountered anything that made her feel uncomfortable? “I never came up against something I couldn’t handle. I was always pretty vocal. Perhaps that was because, thanks to my parents, I knew the industry. Although I was never on set when my mother was involved in a sex scene, put it that way.”

One very early acting job was Peter Greenaway’s 1987 film Drowning by Numbers. “There was a lot of nudity in that too. But I didn’t see it the way I do now.” By which she means that the culture back then didn’t question it. “Of course now our attitudes have completely changed. In fact I declined a project quite recently because it would have involved some nudity and I didn’t believe in what the makers were proposing.”

Richardson began acting at the age of three, as an extra on The Charge of the Light Brigade directed by her father, and since graduating from Rada in 1985 has worked almost continuously. From 2010, she embarked on a long stint in the theatre, with roles in marital drama Side Effects opposite Ethan Hawke on Broadway, and a one-woman show, The Belle of Amherst about Emily Dickinson.

Richardson with James Nesbitt in new Channel 4 drama, Suspect - Channel 4
Richardson with James Nesbitt in new Channel 4 drama, Suspect - Channel 4

“None of these roles were what [my agents] wanted me to do, but after Nip/Tuck I just wanted to go back to the basics, to the reasons why I became an actor in the first place,” she says. “Perhaps they weren’t super smart career decisions but I’d made some money from all my years working in film and I just felt I wanted to explore all this otherness.” Actually, she got some of the best notices of her career.

Her move into theatre coincided with the death of Natasha, after which Richardson temporarily moved to New York to be closer to her two nephews, whose father is the actor Liam Neeson. But she bats away any glib suggestion that the theatre was her way of coping with her sister’s death. “I knew before Tash died that I wanted to do it. Because she had also starred in Lady From the Sea [which Richardson appeared in at the Rose Kingston], people assumed I wanted to do that role because of her. I think I was even quoted as saying ‘this one’s for Tash’. But that Tash had played it was a reason not to do it. Instead I had gone for so long not doing any theatre I felt I had to earn my stripes.”

Richardson was devoted to her sister and still misses her dearly. “Grief is a multi-coloured thing. Certainly after all these years I can’t put it into a little sentence. But the love never dies.”


Suspect begins on Channel 4 on Sunday at 9pm