In her new role as a woman who has an affair with a patient, Natasha Richardson gets to do all the things actors love, writes Donald Clarke.
David Mackenzie's upcoming film Asylum, a grimly compelling adaptation of the similarly titled novel by Patrick McGrath, features a little visual obituary for the late Bewley's Cafe on Dublin's Westmoreland Street.
Back in the summer of 2003, sometime before the final colony of vultures began hovering, Mackenzie's crew moved into the venerable institution and, with only a few tweaks, managed to transform it into a little piece of 1950s London,
Men in grey worsted suits shuffle about. Shoppers with bulky hatboxes circulate. Through the side entrance a vintage motorcar waits to trundle past. Meanwhile, subtly set out from the drab period detail by her cream suit, saucer-shaped hat and aristocratic nose, Natasha Richardson, the film's star and executive producer, sits calmly toying with a cup of tea.
The story of Asylum's production has been one of long delays. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that there has been such a significant gap between the film's completion and its release. In 1996, shortly after the book was published, McGrath's publisher, Harry Evans, suggested that it would make a good film and that Richardson and her husband, Liam Neeson, might be ideal in the leading roles. One can easily see what excited Richardson about the part. Anna Karenina re-imagined as grey-tea English Gothic, Asylum tells the story of the wife of a hidebound psychiatrist who falls in love with a dangerous patient at the institution where her husband works.
Natasha, who is in virtually every scene, gets to do all the things actors love to do: fall in love, weep, romp and pine. Today's scene finds her character seeking traces of her lover - now played by the burly Marton Csokas - after he escapes from the asylum.
"I think I am a hopeless romantic," she says in an icier voice than people normally use when saying such things. "I am attracted to this sort of tragic heroine: Cathy and Heathcliff, that sort of thing. Yes, I am very romantic. It is difficult to find parts in which women go through these great emotional journeys. I have had great parts before, but I have never quite had the opportunity to go through that journey."
Two years after she read the book, Richardson, who had just finished a triumphant run in Cabaret, was approached by Patrick Marber to appear in the Broadway production of his play Closer.
"When he approached me to do Closer on Broadway, I said maybe. It was right after I had done Cabaret, and Closer didn't seem quite so much of a challenge. But it had such an edge and it was obvious Patrick was not afraid of darkness, so I asked him if he was interested in writing a version of Asylum. We did a deal: I would do Closer on Broadway and he would write Asylum."
Though Richardson was very much involved in the early negotiations, she decided to step back from the production itself. So much so that Mackenzie, the director of the acclaimed Young Adam, seems slightly unsure of her position. "I don't think she is an executive producer any more," he says later in his trailer. "As far as I was aware she wasn't an executive producer any more. Certainly she is the actress in the film and that's where it ends."
At any rate, as her deliberations with Marber demonstrate, she seems to have a taste for the business end of things. Some days before I visit the set, Richard Eyre, the former director of Britain's Royal National Theatre, tells me that he sees her as a natural producer. Growing up as the daughter of the decidedly eccentric Vanessa Redgrave, Natasha did, Eyre suggests, have to do a great deal of the day-to-day running of the house. A producer needs just that sort of practical bent.
"Maybe that is why I seem so normal now," she says. "I put all kinds of odd things into my work. But in my life I like to create order and domesticity. That was what I was doing in my childhood: filling that hole. So, in my work, I have to become this gypsy who goes off and explores these extraordinary women. Then I have that other ordered side of my life, which is my husband and my boys."
Richardson's theatrical heritage has, to this point, been an unacknowledged elephant in the room. Her aunt is the lovably scatty Lynne Redgrave. Her uncle is the fearsomely left-wing Corin Redgrave. Her grandfather was Sir Michael Redgrave. Her father was the distinguished film director Tony Richardson. I once asked Liam Neeson what it was like spending Christmas with the in-laws. He smiled and refused to answer.
"Well I understand why people always ask about the family," she says with no apparent weariness. "Of course I do. It is never an issue in the States for some reason - there, it is somewhere down the column inches. It frustrates me that it is still a headline here after all the work that I have done." She has said that she would be unhappy if her own children decided to go into acting. Why? It's the family business, after all.
"Acting is like a vocation. It is something you have to really want to do. Having been brought up the daughter of a great actress was something of a burden for me. The spotlight was thrown on me when I wasn't ready for it. These comparisons inevitably come up. So being the son of two actors might be doubly difficult."
The comparisons are hard to shake. Though both Natasha and her sister Joely have a less weighty presence than their mother, they both have that slightly scratchy vocal timbre. The older they get the more similar they all sound.
Though it may sound slightly cruel to say it, Natasha's role in Asylum would have suited Vanessa perfectly a few decades ago. Buttoned up to bursting point by the era's social strictures, Stella Raphael exhibits that prim sexuality the Redgrave-Richardson girls have consistently traded in. When her lover presses her to the ground in the greenhouse, one can't help but think of Joely in Ken Russell's Lady Chatterley or Vanessa in the same director's The Devils. Just imagine what simmers beneath these corsets (or wimples). For all that, Natasha has managed to forge an individual career. First grabbing attention as Mary Shelley in - it's that man again - Ken Russell's Gothic, she went on to star in such contrasting films as The Handmaid's Tale, The Comfort of Strangers and the remake of Disney's The Parent Trap.
In 1994 she married Neeson. The couple share a house in New York state with their two sons. "It's a tricky one," she says, when asked whether they intend to stay in the US. "It's something we talk about all the time. I am not sure I am entirely comfortable with the idea of the children being brought up as Americans. But Liam says they never will be Americans. They know who their families are. There are moments when I have a hankering for London and we both hanker for Ireland."
Has the US changed in the years since 9/11? "Even before then I sensed an encroaching rigidity, a lack of tolerance in the US. It is part of that PC thing. We are all much more laid-back over here. You are not forced into being one thing or the other. It is easier to be what you want to be here."
One senses she expects her showy part in Asylum to garner her awards and a new kind of recognition. Sadly, the film, though rich in fetid atmosphere, has failed to win over the critics in the US. Part of the difficulty is the melodramatic nature of McGrath's plot. His stories work brilliantly on the page, but can take on the quality of Grand Guignol when stretched across the unforgiving breadth of a cinema screen.
"I don't mind it toppling into melodrama," Mackenzie says during a break between shots. "I am rather looking forward to that, to be honest. Patrick Marber and I had been trying to counter that. But now we are delighted for it to topple into melodrama, just as it topples into comedy elsewhere. I am hoping it will be that sort of rich tapestry of tones."
Notwithstanding the bleating of the New York Times, Mackenzie - who was already shooting Asylum when Young Adam, an adaptation of Alexander Trocchi's beat classic, began gathering acclaim - has managed an impressive achievement. Closer to Hammer than Pinter, the picture offers a class of torrid drama you don't often find in mainstream cinema these days. And if torrid drama isn't your thing, you can still enjoy those last nostalgic glimpses of Bewley's.
Asylum opens on Friday
