Joely Richardson's Adventure: She Packed A Sense Of Humor
Suddenly, no matter what your taste - highbrow or lowbrow - the odds are high that you'll see a daughter of actress Vanessa Redgrave and director Tony Richardson on-screen at the movies.
Natasha Richardson ("Patty Hearst") has the starring role in Paul Schrader's "The Comfort of Strangers."
Her younger sister, Joely, 26, stole several scenes playing a tuba-voiced Finnish princess in the recent John Goodman vehicle, "King Ralph," and has a leading part in Peter Greenaway's "Drowning by Numbers," which shows at 9:30 p.m. today at the Seattle International Film Festival, in the Egyptian Theatre. (A theatrical run starts Friday at the Neptune Theatre.)
Legal difficulties have delayed the American release of Greenaway's 1988 film, but Richardson's memories of it proved fresh in a recent telephone interview from San Francisco.
Richardson had seen no Greenaway films before she got the part in "Drowning by Numbers." Once she was cast, she chose not to go back and look at any. "I didn't want to be influenced," she explains, "in case I didn't like them."
What, then, drew her to working with Greenaway?
She loved the script, which he sent her after seeing her performance in David Hare's "Wetherby" (in which Richardson played Vanessa Redgrave as a young girl). And she welcomed the chance to work with gifted performers like Joan Plowright ("I Love You to Death").
"Drowning by Numbers" is a surreal and macabre farce that tells, with mischievous glee, of three generations of women who all decide to kill their husbands. Richardson, who plays the youngest of the women, suspects she got the role because she took the story in the spirit it was offered: "(Greenaway) was so happy that I understood and wasn't likely to ask him questions about it."
Many actors would have questions to ask. Greenaway's films are sufficiently idiosyncratic to make most movie and stage background obsolete.
Richardson came at her role "very instinctively, moment by moment," she says, thinking of the story as a sort of fantasy. In retrospect, she thinks she would have tried it differently. She cites fellow actress Juliet Stevenson's approach, which was grounded in a very specific, down-to-earth character.
While Greenaway followed his script precisely, he put emphasis on tableaux of moments and games that weren't evident on paper, Richardson reveals.
"It was visually so much richer than I'd imagined. The sets always looked good, but I was amazed by the final product," she said of cinematographer Sacha Vierny's work.
The pleasure of doing a Greenaway film, she says, is the script itself and the adventure it brings. That "adventure" included romping naked in a stream in October and having to sit on dead cows in a country lane.
"You have to approach it with a very big sense of humor," Richardson admits.
Greenaway, Richardson says, is "not someone who gets into long character discussions.
"He likes to mastermind the whole thing and not get involved with character. Any character he does get involved with, he defines in the script - and he thinks those definitions are enough."
Richardson has just finished shooting "Shining Through," a World War II thriller set in Berlin and London, to be directed by David Seltzer. In it, she plays a spy ("Finnish, German - anything Nordic") who is best friends with a Jewish American, played by Melanie Griffith. Michael Douglas will also star.
An interest in stage and film started early for Richardson, as it did with her sister. "When we were little we were always performing plays for the grown-ups, our parents and their friends."
She had dreams of being a gymnast when she was 8, but the family acting tradition soon took over: "The minute I started working professionally, I knew it was a huge passion I'd never get away from."
While she now worries about about being typecast in aristocratic roles with baritone voices (her voice was electronically treated in "King Ralph"), she doesn't discriminate between popular and esoteric cinema in either her viewing habits or the roles she takes.
"I love doing all the different sorts of work. I think there's a place for `King Ralph' and `Drowning by Numbers' ."