Michael Redgrave

He and his contemporaries John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson made up a quartet of male actors who dominated the British stage of the mid-20th century. Redgrave received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in Mourning Becomes Electra (1947), as well as two BAFTA nominations for Best British Actor for his performances in The Night My Number Came Up (1955) and Time Without Pity (1957). At the 4th Cannes Film Festival, he won Best Actor for his performance in The Browning Version (1951).

Michael Redgrave studied at Clifton College and Magdalene College. The recorded working language is English. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are Shakespearean comedy, drama film, comedy film and film noir. Distinctions recorded are Commander of the Order of the British Empire, Knight Bachelor, Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actor and Order of the Dannebrog.

• Honorific Prefix — Sir • Name — Michael Redgrave • Honorific Suffix — CBE • Birth Name — Michael Scudamore Redgrave • Born — 20 March 1908 • Birthplace — Bristol, England • Died — 21 March 1985 • Place of death — Denham, Buckinghamshire, England • Resting Place — St Paul's, Covent Garden, London, England • Occupation — * Actor • filmmaker • manager • author • Children — * Vanessa • Corin • Lynn • Parents — * Roy Redgrave • Margaret Scudamore • Family — Redgrave • Years Active — 1933–1982 • Education — Clifton College, Bristol (independent boarding school) • Alma Mater — Magdalene College, Cambridge

Redgrave was born in Bristol, England, the son of actress Margaret Scudamore and the silent film actor Roy Redgrave. Roy left when Redgrave was six months old to pursue a career in Australia. He died when Redgrave was 14. His mother subsequently married Captain James Anderson, a tea planter. Redgrave greatly disliked his stepfather. Redgrave attended Clifton College in Bristol. Clifton College Theatre was opened in 1966 by Redgrave as the first purpose-built school theatre in the country. After his death, the building was renamed The Redgrave Theatre in his honour. Upon leaving Clifton, Redgrave went on to study the modern languages and English triposes at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Under the direction of Dadie Rylands, he garnered great acclaim for his starring roles on the Cambridge stage as Edgar, Prince Hal and Captain Brassbound. Alongside the art historian Anthony Blunt and schoolfriend Robin Fedden, Redgrave also edited an avant-garde literary magazine called The Venture, which published work by Louis MacNeice, Julian Bell and John Lehmann. He graduated with a third-class degree in 1931. Redgrave taught modern languages at Cranleigh School in Surrey for three years before becoming an actor in 1934. He directed the boys in Hamlet, King Lear and The Tempest, but played all the leading roles himself.

Redgrave made his first professional appearance at the Playhouse in Liverpool on 30 August 1934 as Roy Darwin in Counsellor-at-Law (by Elmer Rice). He then spent two years with the Liverpool Repertory Company; while there, he met his future wife, Rachel Kempson.

Offered a job by Tyrone Guthrie, Redgrave made his professional debut in London at the Old Vic on 14 September 1936, playing Ferdinand in Love's Labours Lost. During 1936–37 he also played Mr Horner in The Country Wife, Orlando in As You Like It, Warbeck in The Witch of Edmonton and Laertes to Laurence Olivier's Hamlet. His hit of the season was Orlando. Edith Evans was his Rosalind and the two fell very much in love. As he later explained: "Edith always had a habit of falling in love with her leading men; with us it just went rather further." As You Like It transferred to the West End's New Theatre in February 1937 and Redgrave again played Orlando. At the Embassy Theatre in March 1937, he played Anderson in a mystery play, The Bat, before returning to the Old Vic in April, succeeding Marius Goring as Chorus in Henry V. Other roles that year included Christopher Drew in Daisy Fisher's comedy A Ship Comes Home at St Martin's Theatre in May and Larry Starr in Philip Leaver's comedy Three Set Out at the Embassy in June, before joining John Gielgud's company at the Queen's Theatre from September 1937 to April 1938, where he played Bolingbroke in Richard II, Charles Surface in The School for Scandal and Baron Tusenbach in Three Sisters.

Redgrave joined the Royal Navy as an ordinary seaman in July 1941, (Illustrious) but was discharged on medical grounds in November 1942. Having spent most of 1942 in the Reserve he managed to direct Lifeline (Norman Armstrong) starring Frank Pettingell at the Duchess Theatre in July; and The Duke in Darkness (Patrick Hamilton) starring Leslie Banks at the St James's Theatre in October, also taking the role of Gribaud.

Redgrave joined the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre company at Stratford-upon-Avon and for the 1951 season appeared as Prospero in The Tempest as well as playing Richard II, Hotspur and Chorus in the Cycle of Histories, for which he also directed Henry IV Part Two. After appearing as Frank Elgin in Winter Journey at the St James's April 1952, he rejoined the Stratford company in 1953 (together with his actress wife, Rachel Kempson) appearing as Shylock, King Lear and Antony in Antony and Cleopatra, also playing Antony when the company transferred to the Prince's Theatre in November 1953, before touring in the Netherlands, Belgium and Paris. At the Apollo in June 1955 he played Hector in Tiger at the Gates, appearing in the same role at the Plymouth Theatre, New York City in October 1955 for which he received the New York Critics' Award. While in America, he directed A Month in the Country at the Phoenix Theatre in April 1956, and directed and played the Prince Regent in The Sleeping Prince with Barbara Bel Geddes at the Coronet Theatre, Los Angeles in November 1956. Returning to London in January 1958, Redgrave appeared as Philip Lester in A Touch of the Sun (N. C. Hunter) at the Saville Theatre. He won Best Actor at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards 1958 for this role. He rejoined the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Company in June 1958, to play Hamlet and Benedick, also playing Hamlet with the company in Leningrad and Moscow in December 1958. (His wife Rachel Kempson played Ursula in Much Ado About Nothing and Lady Capulet in Romeo and Juliet). At the Queen's Theatre, in London in August 1959, he played H.J. in his own adaptation of the Henry James novella The Aspern Papers. His play was later successfully revived on Broadway in 1962, with Wendy Hiller and Maurice Evans. The 1984 London revival featured his daughter, Vanessa Redgrave, along with Christopher Reeve and Hiller, this time in the role of Miss Bordereau.

• Illustration — Michael Redgrave in costume for the lead role in Uncle Vanya, backstage at the Chichester Festival Theatre, 1962. Photo: Tony French. Returning to the UK, in July 1962 he took part in the Chichester Festival Theatre's opening season, playing the title role in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya to the Astrov of Laurence Olivier, who also directed. Alongside John Dexter's Chichester staging of Saint Joan, Olivier's Uncle Vanya was first revived in Chichester in 1963 before transferring to the Old Vic as part of the nascent National Theatre's inaugural season, winning rave reviews and Redgrave's second win as Best Actor at the 1963 Evening Standard Awards. Critic Michael Billington recalled: "In Redgrave's Vanya you saw both a tremulous victim of a lifetime's emotional repression and the wasted potential of a Chekhovian might-have-been: as Redgrave and Olivier took their joint curtain call, linked hands held triumphantly aloft, we were not to know that this was to symbolise the end of their artistic amity." Redgrave played (and co-presented) Lancelot Dodd MA in Arthur Watkyn's Out of Bounds at Wyndham's Theatre in November 1962, following it at the Old Vic with his portrayal of Claudius opposite the Hamlet of Peter O'Toole in October 1963. This Hamlet was in fact the National Theatre's official opening production, directed by Olivier, but Simon Callow has dubbed it "slow, solemn, long", while Ken Campbell vividly described it as "brochure theatre." In January 1964, at the National, he played the title role in Hobson's Choice, which he admitted was well outside his range: "I couldn't do the Lancashire accent and that shook my nerve terribly – all the other performances suffered." While still at the National in June 1964, he also played Halvard Solness in The Master Builder, which he said 'went wrong'. At this time he had incipient Parkinson's disease, although he did not know it. In May and June 1965, Redgrave directed the opening festival of the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford, including directing and playing Rakitin in A Month in the Country (co-starring with Ingrid Bergman as Natalya Petrovna), and Samson in Samson Agonistes (co-starring with Rachel Kempson as Chorus). He again played Rakitin in September 1965, when his production transferred to the Cambridge Theatre in London. For the Glyndebourne Festival Opera he directed Werther in 1966 and La bohème in 1967.

At the Mermaid Theatre in July 1971 he played Mr Jaraby in The Old Boys (William Trevor) and had an unfortunate experience: "My memory went, and on the first night they made me wear a deaf aid to hear some lines from the prompter and it literally fell to pieces – there were little bits of machinery all over the floor, so I then knew I really couldn't go on, at least not learning new plays." Nevertheless, he successfully took over the part of Father in John Mortimer's A Voyage Round My Father at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, also touring Canada and Australia in the role in 1972–73. He returned to international touring in 1974–75 with a Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Hollow Crown, visiting major venues in the US, New Zealand and Australia, while in 1976–77 he toured South America, Canada, the UK and the US in the anthology, Shakespeare's People. Redgrave's final theatre appearance came in May 1979 when he portrayed Jasper in Simon Gray's Close of Play, directed on the Lyttelton stage at the National Theatre by Harold Pinter. It was a silent, seated role, based on Gray's own father, who had died a year before he wrote the play. As Gray has said: "Jasper is in fact dead but is forced to endure, as if alive, a traditional English Sunday, helpless in his favourite armchair as his three sons and their wives fall to pieces in the usual English middle class style, sometimes blaming him, sometimes appealing to him for help and sobbing at his feet for forgiveness, but basically ignoring him. In other words I had stuck him in Hell, which turns out to be 'life, old life itself'."

• Illustration — Redgrave (right) with Catherine Lacey and Margaret Lockwood in a publicity shot for Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (1938) Redgrave first appeared on BBC television at the Alexandra Palace in 1937, in scenes from Romeo and Juliet. His first major film role was in Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (1938), which included a scene where he hummed the "Colonel Bogey March" in what was the first appearance of the tune in film. Ted Black put him under contract at Gainsborough. Redgrave also starred in The Stars Look Down (1940), with James Mason in the film of Robert Ardrey's play Thunder Rock (1942), and in the ventriloquist's dummy episode of the Ealing compendium film Dead of Night (1945). In 1946, the Motion Picture Herald annual poll of British film exhibitors showed that Redgrave was ranked in fourth place on a list of the most popular British stars at the box office. His first American film role was opposite Rosalind Russell in Mourning Becomes Electra (1947), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor. In 1951 he starred in The Browning Version, from Terence Rattigan's play of the same name. The Daily Mirror described Redgrave's performance as Crocker-Harris as "one of the greatest performances ever seen in films". In 1951, the Motion Picture Herald annual poll of British film exhibitors showed that Redgrave was ranked in ninth place on a list of the most popular British stars at the box office. The 1950s also saw Redgrave in The Importance of Being Earnest (1952), The Dambusters (1954) with his portrayal of the inventor Barnes Wallis, 1984 (1956), Time Without Pity (1957), for which he was nominated for a BAFTA Award, and The Quiet American (1958). During the 1960s he was featured in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, and in the 1970s he starred opposite Bette Davis in Connecting Rooms (1970) and played Sergey Sazonov in Nicholas and Alexandra (1971). Notable television performances include narration for The Great War (1964), a history of World War I using stills and 'stretched' archive film, and the less successful Lost Peace series (BBC Television, 1964 and 1966). Of the latter, Philip Purser wrote: "The commentary, spoken by Sir Michael Redgrave, took on an unremittingly pessimistic tone from the outset." In 1970 he played Polonius in an ITV production of Hamlet that was broadcast in the United States as a Hallmark Hall of Fame special, and in 1973 he played a supporting role in David Winters' musical television film adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, starring Kirk Douglas. In 1975, Redgrave narrated the epic poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (a poem that Redgrave taught as a young schoolmaster). The film received six international film festival prizes, of which five were first place in category.

Redgrave married actress Rachel Kempson in 1935. They remained married for 50 years from 1935 until his death. Their children Vanessa (b. 1937), Corin (1939–2010) and Lynn Redgrave (1943–2010), and their grandchildren Natasha Richardson (1963–2009), Joely Richardson (b. 1965) and Jemma Redgrave (b. 1965) have also been involved in theatre and film as actors. Their grandson Carlo Gabriel Nero is a screenwriter and film director; only Luke Redgrave has taken a path outside the theatre. His daughter Lynn wrote a one-woman play for herself called Shakespeare for My Father. She was nominated for Broadway's Tony Award for this role. She traced her love for Shakespeare as a way of following and finding her often absent father. Redgrave owned White Roding Windmill from 1937 to 1946. He and his family lived in Bedford House on Chiswick Mall from 1945 to 1954. His entry for Who's Who in the Theatre (1981) gives his address as Wilks Water, Odiham, Hampshire.

Corin helped his father in the writing of his last autobiography. During one of Corin's visits to his father, the latter said, "There is something I ought to tell you". Then, after a long pause, "I am, to say the least of it, bisexual". Corin encouraged him to acknowledge his bisexuality in the book. Redgrave agreed to do so, but in the end he chose to remain silent about it. Alan Strachan's 2004 biography of Redgrave discusses his affairs with both men and women. Although Redgrave had some long-term relationships with men, he also was prone to cruising Victoria or Knightsbridge for what he called "a necessary degradation", a habit of quick pick-ups that left him with a lasting sense of self-disgust. The 1996 BBC documentary film Michael Redgrave: My Father, narrated by Corin Redgrave, and based on his book of the same name, discusses his father's bisexuality in some depth. Rachel Kempson recounted that when she proposed to him, Redgrave said that there were "difficulties to do with his nature, and that he felt he ought not to marry". She said that she understood, it did not matter, and that she loved him. To this, Redgrave replied, "Very well. If you're sure, we will". During the filming of Fritz Lang's Secret Beyond the Door (1947), Redgrave met Bob Mitchell, and they soon became lovers. Mitchell set up house close to the Redgraves, and he became a surrogate "uncle" to Redgrave's children (then aged 11, 9 and 5), who adored him. Mitchell later had children of his own, including a son he named Michael. Fred Sadoff was an actor/director who became Redgrave's assistant and lover; they shared lodgings in New York and London. A card was found among Redgrave's effects after his death. The card was signed "Tommy, Liverpool, January 1940", and on it were the words (quoted from W.H. Auden): "The word is love. Surely one fearless kiss would cure the million fevers".

In 1976, after suffering symptoms for many years, Redgrave was diagnosed with rapidly advancing Parkinson's disease. He began a regimen of therapies and medications that caused disorientation and other side effects. Costs for his healthcare expenses and his diminished earning power caused the family to apply for public assistance from the King George's Pension Fund for Actors and Actresses. In an interview on his 70th birthday, he said: "For a long time, nobody understood the Parkinson's condition, and directors thought I was just forgetful or drunk – and even now the work isn't easy. The difficulty is not just remembering lines but getting from place to place." Redgrave died in a nursing home in Denham, Buckinghamshire, on 21 March 1985, from Parkinson's disease, the day after his 77th birthday. He was cremated at Mortlake Crematorium and his ashes were scattered in the garden of St Paul's, Covent Garden (The Actors' Church), London.

• Illustration — Sir Michael Redgrave by Allan Warren, 1973

• Year — Programme — Episode/source • 1948 — CBS's Studio One — The Return of the Native • 1952/3 — Horatio Hornblower — 48 Episodes in the title role on CBS • 1952 — Theatre Guild on the Air — The Unguarded Hour • 1953 — Theatre Guild on the Air — Jane

• Year — Title — Role — Director — Playwright(s) — Theatre • 1936 — Love's Labours Lost — Ferdinand — William Shakespeare — Old Vic Theatre, London • 1936-37 — The Witch of Edmonton — Warbeck — Saint Denis — Thomas Dekker — Old Vic Theatre, London • 1936-37 — As You Like It — Orlando — Ejme Church — William Shakespeare — Old Vic Theatre, London • 1936-37 — The Country Wife — Mr Horner — Tyrone Gathrie — William Wycherley — Old Vic Theatre, London • 1937 — The Bat — Anderson — Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood — Embassy Theatre • A Ship Comes Home — Christopher Drew — Daisy Fisher — St Martins Theatre • 1938 — The White Guard — Alexi Turbin — Mikhail Bulgakov — Phoenix Theatre • Twelfth Night — Sir Andrew Agnechek — William Shakespeare — Phoenix Theatre • 1939 — The Family Reunion — Harry, Lord Monchesney — T. S. Eliot — Westminster Theatre • 1940 — The Beggar's Opera — Captain Macheath — John Gay — Theatre Royal, Haymarket • 1943 — A Month in the Country — Rakitin — Ivan Turgenev — St James' Theatre • 1947 — Macbeth — Macbeth — William Shakespeare — Aldwych Theatre • 1958 — A Touch of the Sun — Philip Lester — N. C. Hunter — Saville Theatre • 1959 — The Aspern Papers — H.J — Henry James — Queen's Theatre, London • 1960 — The Tiger and the Horse — Jack Dean — Frith Banbury — Robert Bolt — Queen's Theatre, London • 1961 — The Complaisant Lover — Victor Rhodes — Graham Greene — Ethel Barrymore Theatre, New York • 1962 — Out of Bounds — Launcelot Dodd MA — Arthur Watkyn — Wyndham's Theatre • 1962-63 — Uncle Vanya — Uncle Vanya — Laurence Olivier — Anton Chekhov — Chichester Festival Theatre • 1963 — Hamlet — King Claudius — Laurence Olivier — William Shakespeare — National Theatre • 1964 — Hobson's Choice — Henry Horatio Hobson — Harold Brighouse — National Theatre • 1971 — The Old Boys — Mr Jaraby — William Trevor — Mermaid Theatre • A Voyage Round My Father — Father — John Mortimer — Theatre Royal, Haymarket • 1979 — Close of Play — Jasper — Harold Pinter — Simon Gray — National Theatre

Michael Redgrave was recorded at birth as Michael Scudamore Redgrave. The authorities additionally record the headings Michael Scudamore Redgrave, Sir Michael Scudamore Redgrave and Sir Michael Redgrave. His recorded language was English. He was the child of Roy Redgrave and Margaret Scudamore. He married Rachel Kempson. 3 children are recorded: Vanessa Redgrave, Corin Redgrave and Lynn Redgrave.

Michael Redgrave is recorded as having received Commander of the Order of the British Empire, Knight Bachelor and Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actor. Recognition and collections. Redgrave received Commander of the Order of the British Empire, Knight Bachelor, Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actor and Order of the Dannebrog.