RIP, Natasha Richardson

[Th3_Crusader]

 

Slideshow:Actress Natasha Richardson dies at 45 Play Video Video:Actress Natasha Richardson has died AP Play Video Video:Ski Safety: Calls For Mandatory Helmets CBS 2 New York NEW YORK Natasha Richardson, a gifted and precocious heiress to acting royalty whose career highlights included the film "Patty Hearst" and a Tony-winning performance in a stage revival of "Cabaret," died Wednesday at age 45 after suffering a head injury during a beginners' ski lesson.

 

 

 

Alan Nierob, the Los Angeles-based publicist for Richardson's husband Liam Neeson, confirmed her death in a written statement.

 

 

 

"Liam Neeson, his sons (Micheal, 13, and 12-year-old Daniel), and the entire family are shocked and devastated by the tragic death of their beloved Natasha," the statement said. "They are profoundly grateful for the support, love and prayers of everyone, and ask for privacy during this very difficult time."

 

 

 

The statement did not give details on the cause of death for Richardson, who suffered a head injury and fell on a beginner's trail during a private ski lesson at the luxury Mont Tremblant ski resort in Quebec. Seemingly fine after the fall, about an hour later she complained that she didn't feel well.

 

 

 

She was hospitalized Tuesday in Montreal and later flown to a hospital in New York, where family members had been seen coming and going.

 

 

 

Vanessa Redgrave, Richardson's mother, arrived in a car with darkened windows and was taken through a garage when she arrived at the Lenox Hill Hospital on Manhattan's Upper East Side about 5 p.m. Wednesday. An hour earlier, Richardson's sister, Joely, arrived alone and was swarmed by the media as she entered through the back of the hospital.

 

 

 

It was a sudden and horrifying loss for her family and friends, for the film and theater communities, for her many fans and for both her native and adoptive countries. Descended from at least three generations of actors, Richardson was a proper Londoner who came to love the noise of New York, an elegant blonde with large, lively eyes, a bright smile and a hearty laugh.

 

 

 

If she never quite attained the acting heights of her Academy Award-winning mother, she still had enjoyed a long and worthy career. As an actress, Richardson was equally adept at passion and restraint, able to portray besieged women both confessional (Tennessee Williams' Blanche DuBois) and confined (the concubine in the futuristic horror of "The Handmaid's Tale").

 

 

 

Like other family members, she divided her time between stage and screen. On Broadway, she won a Tony for her performance as Sally Bowles in a 1998 revival of "Cabaret." She also appeared in New York in a production of Patrick Marber's "Closer" (1999) as well as 2005 revival of Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire," in which she played Blanche opposite John C. Reilly's Stanley Kowalski.

 

 

 

She met Neeson when they made their Broadway debuts in 1993, co-starring in "Anna Christie," Eugene O'Neill's drama about a former prostitute and the sailor who falls in love with her.

 

 

 

"The astonishing Natasha Richardson ... gives what may prove to be the performance of the season as Anna, turning a heroine who has long been portrayed (and reviled) as a [bleep] with a heart of gold into a tough, ruthlessly unsentimental apostle of O'Neill's tragic understanding of life," The New York Times critic Frank Rich wrote. "Miss Richardson, seeming more like a youthful incarnation of her mother, Vanessa Redgrave, than she has before, is riveting from her first entrance through a saloon doorway's ethereal shaft of golden light."

 

 

 

Her most notable film roles came earlier in her career. Richardson played the title character in Paul Schrader's "Patty Hearst," a 1988 biopic about the kidnapped heiress for which the actress became so immersed that even between scenes she wore a blindfold, the better to identify with her real-life counterpart.

 

 

 

"Natasha Richardson ... has been handed a big unwritten role; she feels her way into it, and she fills it," wrote The New Yorker's Pauline Kael. "We feel how alone and paralyzed Patty is she retreats into being a hidden observer."

 

 

 

Richardson was directed again by Schrader in a 1990 adaptation of Ian McEwan's "The Comfort of Strangers" and, also in 1990, starred in the screen version of Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale."

 

 

 

She later co-starred with Neeson in "Nell," with Mia Farrow in "Widow's Peak" and with a pre-teen Lindsay Lohan in a remake of "The Parent Trap." More recent movies, none of them widely seen, included "Wild Child," "Evening" and "Asylum."

 

 

 

She was born in London in 1963, the performing gene inherited not just from her parents (Vanessa Redgrave and director Tony Richardson), but from her maternal grandparents (Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson), an aunt (Lynn Redgrave) and an uncle (Corin Redgrave). Her younger sister, Joely Richardson, also joined the family business.

 

 

 

Friends and family members remembered Natasha as an unusually poised child, perhaps forced to grow up early when her father left her mother in the late '60s for Jeanne Moreau. (Tony Richardson died in 1991).

 

 

 

Interviewed by The Associated Press in 2001, Natasha Richardson said she related well to her family if only because, "We've all been through it in one way or another and so we've had to be strong. Also we embrace life. We are not cynical about life."

 

 

 

Richardson always planned to act, apart from one brief childhood moment when she wanted to be a flight attendant "wonderful irony now since I hate to fly and have to take a pill in order to get on a plane. I'm so terrified."

 

 

 

Her screen debut came at age 4 when she appeared as a flower girl in "The Charge of the Light Brigade," directed by her father, whose movies included "Tom Jones" and "The Entertainer." The show business wand had already tapped her the year before, when she saw her mother in the 1967 film version of the Broadway show "Camelot."

 

 

 

"She was so beautiful. I still look at that movie and I can't believe it. It still makes me cry, the beauty of it. I could go on and on in that white fur hooded thing, when she comes through the forest for the first time. You've never seen anything so beautiful!" Richardson said.

 

 

 

She studied at London's Central School of Speech and Drama and was an experienced stage actress by her early 20s, appearing in "On the Razzle," "Charley's Aunt" and "The Seagull," for which the London Drama Critics awarded her most promising newcomer.

 

 

 

Although she never shared her mother's fiercely expressed political views, they were close professionally and acted together, most recently on Broadway to play the roles of mother and daughter in a one-night benefit concert version of "A Little Night Music," the Stephen Sondheim-Hugh Wheeler musical.

 

 

 

Before meeting up with Neeson (who called her "Tash") Richardson was married to theater and producer Robert Fox, whose credits include the 1985 staging of "The Seagull" in which his future wife appeared.

 

 

 

She sometimes remarked on the differences between her and her second husband she from a theatrical dynasty and he from a working-class background in Northern Ireland.

 

 

 

"He's more laid back, happy to see what happens, whereas I'm a doer and I plan ahead," Richardson told The Independent on Sunday newspaper in 2003. "The differences sometimes get in the way but they can be the very things that feed a marriage, too."

 

 

 

She once said that Neeson's serious injury in a 2000 motorcycle accident he suffered a crushed pelvis after colliding with a deer in upstate New York had made her really appreciate life.

 

 

 

"I wake up every morning feeling lucky which is driven by fear, no doubt, since I know it could all go away," she told The Daily Telegraph newspaper in 2003.

 

 

 

If anyone who doesn't know her, she played the mother on "Parent Trap"

[Lenticular_J]

Holy [cabbage], she died from that? Didn't Jon Stewart make a joke about it like two days ago?

[Th3_Crusader]

No? She got into a skiing accident and had brain damage, then later died from it.

[Lionheart_0]

Just moved this.

[tripsis]

If anyone who doesn't know her, she played the mother on "Parent Trap"

 

Aw I love that movie :(

 

 

 

Wow, it's hard to imagine her dying because of a fall in a beginners ski class. It must have been one hard fall... :-k I can only imagine what the family must be going through, especially given the suddenness of her death.

[Lenticular_J]

No? She got into a skiing accident and had brain damage, then later died from it.

 

I know. I'm pretty sure Jon Stewart made a joke about it a couple days ago, when it didn't seem like she was hurt.

 

 

 

Or maybe skiing jokes are very common.

[ElkNight]

Dont really know who she is. Anyone dieing is pretty bad though.

[blushenka]

That is so strange. I read she was a 'long-time smoker', and lobbied against banning smoking in restaurants and stuff. And she goes and dies from a fall in the snow, during a 'beginner's ski lesson'. Wow, such is life, silly and meaningless. I don't mean to divert the thread through, RIP.

[Clay_More12]

Parent Trap has got to be my top 10 movies! sad to see her go -=-R.I.P-=-

[Dexek]

I was very sad to hear about this. Definitely a oddity to die from such an common thing as falling in ski class. Definitely a freak-accident. RIP

[RayOxide]

RIP One hit wonder.

 

hehe :P

[deathdrow]

I was very sad to hear about this. Definitely a oddity to die from such an common thing as falling in ski class. Definitely a freak-accident. RIP

 

Personally I think the instructor should have told her to put a friggin helmet on.

 

and if he did, then I guess it's just a freak accident.

 

This accident is starting a bunch of talk about mandatory helmet wearing on ski hills in quebec.

[i_love_burritos]

If you people read the news, then you would know she wasn't killed at the point of impact, and she actually felt fine after her fall. The thing is, the ambulance was turned away because of this. Three hours later, complaining of a headache she was transported to the local hospital. She died later, seven hours later from the initial fall, reports say from interal bleeding.

 

 

 

I feel sorry for Mr.Neeson