Redgrave made her Broadway debut in 1967 and performed in several stage productions in New York City while making frequent returns to London's West End. Redgrave performed with her sister Vanessa in Three Sisters in London and in the title role of Baby Jane Hudson in a television production of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? in 1991.
Redgrave made a return to cinema in the late 1990s, in films such as Shine (1996) and Gods and Monsters (1998), for which she received her second Academy Award nomination and won a Golden Globe Award For Best Supporting Actress. Lynn Redgrave is the only person to have been nominated for all of the 'Big Four' American entertainment awards (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony, collectively known when all four have been won as "EGOT") – without winning any of them.[1]
Early life and theatrical family
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (August 2009)
Redgrave became well-known in the United States after appearing in the television series House Calls, for which she received an Emmy nomination. She was fired from the series after she insisted on bringing her child to rehearsals so as to continue a breastfeeding schedule. A lawsuit ensued but was dismissed a few years later. Following that, she appeared in a long-running series of television commercials for H. J. Heinz Company, then the manufacturer of the weight loss foods for Weight Watchers, a Heinz subsidiary. Her signature line for the ads was "This Is Living, Not Dieting!". She wrote a book of her life experiences with the same title,[5] which included a selection of Weight Watchers recipes. The autobiographical section later became the basis of her one-woman play Shakespeare for My Father.
In 1989, she appeared on Broadway in Love Letters with her husband John Clark, and thereafter they performed the play around the country, on one occasion for the jury in the O. J. Simpson case. In 1993, she appeared on Broadway in the one-woman play Shakespeare for My Father, which Clark produced and directed. She was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play. In 1993, she was elected president of the Players' Club.
In 2005, Redgrave appeared at Quinnipiac University and Connecticut College in the play Sisters of the Garden, about the sisters Fanny and Rebekka Mendelssohn and Nadia and Lili Boulanger.[6] She was also reported to be writing a one-woman play about her battle with breast cancer and her 2003 mastectomy, based on her book Journal: A Mother and Daughter's Recovery from Breast Cancer with photos by her daughter Annabel and text by Redgrave herself.[7]
In September 2006, she appeared in Nightingale, the U.S. premiere of her new one-woman play based upon her maternal grandmother Beatrice, at Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum. She also performed the play in May 2007 at Hartford Stage in Hartford, Connecticut. In 2007, she appeared in an episode of Desperate Housewives as Dahlia Hainsworth, the mother of Susan Delfino's boyfriend Ian Hainsworth.
Redgrave narrated approximately 20 audiobooks, including Prince Caspian: The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis for Harper Audio[9] and Inkheart by Cornelia Funke for Listening Library.[10]
Personal life
On 2 April 1967, Lynn Redgrave married actor John Clark.[11][12] Together they had three children. Her marriage to Clark was dissolved in 2000, two years after he revealed that he had had an affair with her personal assistant, Nicolette Hannah, and that Lynn's supposed grandson Zachary was in fact Clark's own son by Hannah, who had married (and subsequently divorced) their son Benjamin.[2] The divorce proceedings were acrimonious and became front-page news, with Clark alleging that Redgrave had also been unfaithful.[13][14]
Redgrave discussed her health problems associated with bulimia and breast cancer. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in December 2002, had a mastectomy in January 2003 and underwent chemotherapy.[17] She ultimately died from the cancer[18] at her home in Kent, Connecticut on 2 May 2010, aged 67.[19]
Redgrave's funeral was held on 8 May 2010 at the First Congregational Church in Kent. She was interred in St Peter's Episcopal Cemetery in the hamlet of Lithgow, New York, where her mother Rachel Kempson and her niece Natasha Richardson are also interred.[20]
^Potter, Steve (3 August 2016). "City Scene: Gone but not forgotten". The Telegraph. Alton, Illinois: Civitas Media. Retrieved 30 November 2016. ...Actress Lynn Redgrave...credited as the only person to have been nominated for all of the "Big Four" awards...without ever winning any of them.
^The production was not well reviewed in general, but Bernard Levin, writing in the London Daily Express under the headline Are there any more at home like Lynn Redgrave?, wrote that her performance as Helena was "an outrageous and unforgivable atrocity on the poor Bard, and it is utterly delightful and almost wholly successful. And this astonishing infant is only 18 years old!" (25 January 1962). The fact that the critic Levin was actively courting Redgrave's elder sister Vanessa may have been significant.
![[icon]](File:Wiki_letter_w_cropped.svg){kind=small}
