Word: vanessa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...cheerful child from the beginning ("In my childhood I remember only things like sunny days"), though it wasn't always easy to see why. She developed acute anemia and was so weak that she went to the park in a wheelchair until she was six. She remembers Vanessa as "simply smashing," Corin as "incredibly brilliant," and her mother as "the mother of all the mothers...
...Head!" The teens were a bit gritty for both the Redgrave girls, particularly for Vanessa. Her father once introduced her to friends as "my daughter Vanessa?she'll never be an actress, so we're having her do languages. That way she can always get a job with an airline or something." She grew like a beanstalk on a hill of hormones. One day, after staring appalled at her reflection, she broke into tears and telephoned her mother, who was weekending in the country. "Mummy! Mummy!" she cried, "I just looked in your mirror...
Glamor & Clamor. Meanwhile, Vanessa went into the theater and had her self a thundering great success. First year out of school she was in two West End plays; by 1959 she was signed on at the Stratford Old Vic; and in a 1961 production of As You Like It, she played a Rosalind of such fire and grace that most theater people were agreed: for the next 25 years any actress who values her reputation will think twice before playing Rosalind in England...
...glamor and the clamor of it all got to Lynn, and one day she decided that horses really were not the answer. When Vanessa turned down a minor part in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Lynn jumped at the chance to play it. In 1963, Olivier took her on at the National Theater, and she found that she could play for pathos (Brecht's Mother Courage) as well as waddle through twaddle (Coward's Hay Fever). Big things were expected of her?but not quite the sort of big things that actually happened...
Naked down Piccadilly. As usual, everything happened to Vanessa first. Offered a part in Morgan!, she decided to take a stab at pictures. The public got the point all right. To Vanessa's amazement, millions acclaimed her as the most exciting thing the British had produced since radar. Director Antonioni, casting for a British actress to play in Blow-Up, had heard about Vanessa. "I had not met her before," he recalls, "but I looked at stacks of her photos and concluded that she was the one I wanted. But I didn't know if she really would accept...