Vanessa Redgrave, born Jan 30, 1937

Those early perfs are gawky but lately she's transparent in the most compelling way.

Maybe yes, she was awful early on, plus I hate that British look-at-me-I'm-acting-here, uh, acting that we're all supposed to stand around and applaud

yeah she outgrew that, thankfully; she ain't Judi Dench.

The Bostonians is a prime example of a riveting performance in a crappy movie.

her performance in blow up is so... weird. i like her a lot though. Howard's End gets my vote.

Just the films, obv

I assume you want us to ignore "Nip/Tuck", then?

films, TV, this is ILX, not Lee Marvin's house.

OMG The Devils! The Devils. That movie is so overwhelming that I just don't even know what to say about it, just repeat the title over and over.
(I haven't seen most of these movies though.)
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7154/6526259561_d214bd82f6_m.jpg

http://deeperintomovies.net/journal/image08/devils4.jpg

anyone ever see the Renee Richards TV bio?

In 1986...a good period for TV bios. I believe I did see that. I forgot about Murder on the Orient Express.

The Devils

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

so this'll get about 5 votes

I voted for The Bostonians.

Frank Perry had 10 voters.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

oh, Sexy Learning How to Film-Act Vanessa carries the day.

i thought i voted for howard's end? musta forgot

she really makes the most of her 10-min role as the coke-addict opera diva in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMQNH9G5nbI

excerpt focusing on The Devils from Dan Callahan's new book on her ... wow, Heston and Vanessa in Macbeth onstage in LA in 1974! He musta still been a centrist Democrat.

Redgrave is certainly one of the least cynical people possible in her public life, but she is able to imagine a kind of cynicism unto madness for this wretched and lethal Mother Superior. She keeps this woman’s opposing qualities in play without once descending into caricature or one-note satire. Sister Jeanne tells Madeleine that most of the women in the order are only there because they are unmarriageable girls. This is the one scene where Sister Jeanne seems fully aware of her situation and fully able to laugh at it, in her habitual way, as if she’s sneering at the God who gave her a pretty face and a hump on her back to go with it.

Judging from her other work, surely Redgrave would have preferred a more sober accounting of this woman’s cracked personality, but she enters into Russell’s engrained bad taste and vulgarity, using it when it is useful to her and discarding it entirely when she wants us to feel the depth of this woman’s depravity and pain. If "The Devils" is a major film, it is Redgrave who makes it so. No other actress of her time could have given such an extreme and dirty and comic performance while still remaining somehow immaculately pure and so sad at the core.

http://www.rogerebert.com/balder-and-dash/book-excerpt-vanessa-the-life-of-vanessa-redgrave-by-dan-callahan

She really lets it all it hang out in Isadora, topless dancing and unplaceable Yank accent included. Some funny lines in the pre-death Rivieria framing: "Jazz is America's way of laughing at Isadora Duncan."

She's always different yet uses no tricks; she's transparent. I dunno how she does it.