I met Joely Richardson in a café in Ladbroke Grove the morning after England had lost to France in their opening match of Euro 2004. If that seems like a long time ago, it was the only opportunity. She was home in London for a week's break from filming the second series of Nip/Tuck, the American television plastic surgery drama that has provided her with guaranteed work and a decent role for the last couple of years. "The first script was excellent. When you sign on the dotted line, you have no idea how it's going to be. In retrospect do I think it was a good thing? Absolutely." The next day, she was flying back to resume her five-month shooting stint in Los Angeles. Her life over there is, she says, "quite insular. I don't go out that much. I see an awful lot of films and watch quite a bit of television, and I work."
She arrived at the café alone, no entourage, always a good indicator that fame hasn't messed too much with someone's head. She was wearing a black T-shirt, Club Monaco, blue cropped jeans, black Prada flats, a diamond bracelet "a fella gave me" and a ring she'd bought for £100 on holiday in Greece with her mother, Vanessa Redgrave, and her daughter, Daisy. She ordered bacon and eggs. She is a shade under 5ft 10in and as thin as a rake. She wouldn't tell me what she weighs; a surprise, given that she was pretty forthcoming in answer to other, I would have thought, more personal questions. Yet she will admit to putting on a stone in recent months, thanks to a predilection for hamburgers and milkshakes, which she has had to address "because my costumes didn't fit".
She smokes (those supposedly healthy American Spirit cigarettes) but doesn't drink alcohol and has never done drugs. "I escaped that, I was always a bit of a coward." Overall, in our 90 minutes, she was straightforward, confident, mildly cynical, good fun. Whatever baggage she'd brought with her into adult life from her unusual childhood, I think she winnowed it down and stowed it neatly away some time ago. As she says more than once, a lot of childhoods look unusual from the outside. For her, it was simply what she knew.
She said she is saved from loneliness in LA by a couple of close friends, then admitted to a feeling that "is in the ballpark of loneliness", plus a bit of homesickness, plus feeling "untethered in this strange city with no nucleus where you can't walk anywhere". Her rented car/rented flat arrangement lends a transitory feel to her life: "I feel like I've got a foot in each place." By the time you read this, she'll almost be due back in Britain again. I don't think she'll be sorry. "I'm a real homebody," she said. The previous evening, she'd hosted a football party at her home in Bayswater. "There was quite a crowd. I've got a very big telly. That was my extravagance last year. My friend made a chilli and we had all these cakes." I get the feeling that, away from home, Richardson misses England and Englishness more than most. And mostly she misses her daughter, Daisy, 12, even though Daisy joins her for extended stays in America.
As yet, Daisy hasn't shown any inclination to act, beyond the normal childhood dressing-up games. Yet it would be a surprise if she were not to perform more seriously in future, given that her mother is a member of the fourth generation of Britain's foremost acting family. We skirted around this heritage for a quarter of an hour or so and then got stuck into it at length. "I don't have a problem talking about my parents," said Richardson, to my relief. "It's what I know and it's what I came from."
And what she comes from is quite some pedigree, or, depending on your point of view, quite some burden. Her mother, whose birth in 1937 was announced on stage at the Old Vic by Sir Laurence Olivier, no less, became arguably the finest English actress of her generation. Her father, Tony Richardson, having directed Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer at the Royal Court, went on to either produce or direct most of the signature British films of the Sixties. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner was his, and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and he won an Oscar for Tom Jones. In addition to his professional talent, Richardson was also, like his wife, tall and strikingly attractive. In the early to mid-Sixties, before his affair with Jeanne Moreau intervened, Richardson and Redgrave were one of the coolest couples on the planet. Added to that, Joely Richardson's sister is Natasha Richardson; her brother-in-law is Liam Neeson; her uncle Corin Redgrave; her aunt Lynn Redgrave; her grandfather Sir Michael Redgrave; and her great-grandfather Roy Redgrave emigrated to become a star of silent films in Australia.
"When they say it is a big theatrical dynasty," said Richardson, "it is big and it is a dynasty and it has been primarily theatrical, but I wouldn't want to butt in on what my mum or my uncle might have done because my route hasn't been doing the classics." She does not make comparisons with her mother's career. "It's a different industry. My work is very small and detailed. It's a ridiculous analogy but say Galliano does this Egyptian thing with gold, then Chanel does this incredibly intricate needlework. I'm not a Shakespearean actress, it's not what I do. I did do drama school and the RSC, the West End and New York, but I haven't given 'my Cleopatra', do you know what I'm saying?"
I know exactly what she's saying. It forms the context for the entire interview. A simplistic reading of her career, I began, would be...? "Choppy?" she interjected. Yeah, choppy and, well, the two things everybody knows about your mum are that she's this great classical actress and a firebrand left-winger (for many years Vanessa and Corin Redgrave were the public face and the main benefactors of the Workers' Revolutionary Party, a tiny Trotskyite sect). And you didn't become a classical actress, as you say, and now you're in this poppy series on American TV, and I don't know but I'm assuming you're not politically committed in the way your mother is? "Certainly not in the way my mother is, no, though I did vote [in the European elections] this week. Liberal Democrat." So a simplistic reading of that would be that it constitutes some form of rebellion? "Yes, you're absolutely right."
"I've said this to my mum," she went on, "so it's not airing anything new, I do think there was a ten-year stretch [roughly through Joely's teens] that she [Vanessa] would do differently and it was intense, to be in a political household. That's the irony. People talk about a theatrical dynasty as if we were all sitting round a Sunday lunch table in velvet robes, saying, 'Oh darling!' but it was about as opposite to that as you can get. We lived in a little house in Hammersmith and people were always shocked when they saw it." How little? "It wasn't tiny but there were five of us living there. It wasn't like any of the houses round here [Notting Hill], put it like that."
I said, is that really true, because although I've read that, I struggle to imagine Vanessa Redgrave living in a semi in Hammersmith. "She did," said the daughter. Did she not have the money? Or was it a political thing? "It was partly political and she did give away a lot of money. Those years were very full-on. She was on the phone the whole time or doing the paper round and that was to her credit because it was not 'Yes, I do this, but I live like this', she did live by her beliefs... I don't tell any of this as a sob story, it's what I knew. I feel very strongly my mother is a remarkable woman. She is not a phoney on any level, no double life at all and to me that's a beautiful thing."
Joely was born in 1965, so she was still a baby when her parents split up. Her father went to live in Los Angeles and it was he who became the parent she wanted to please, the glamorous one, the hero. "He lived in another country, I was way more intimidated by him than I was by my mother. I know my mum is this sort of legendary icon, and everyone naturally assumed that all my influences and neuroses came from her, but it wasn't like that. I never think about her career or her politics. I did want to impress my father but that was a long time ago. Someone said when I got the Golden Globe nomination this year, 'Oh, your dad would be proud,' but my dad would, I hope, be proud of me as a human being, forget work." (Tony Richardson, who was bisexual, died of an Aids-related illness in 1991. His daughters spent his final fortnight nursing him in hospital in Los Angeles.)
When she was 14 and not, I'm guessing, getting on too well with her mother, Richardson left the fearsomely academic ("I was always middling") St Paul's Girls' School, to take up a tennis scholarship near Santa Barbara, a couple of hours' drive from her father's home in Los Angeles. She stayed two years before her father intervened to say, "This school's rubbish, you have to get serious now." She then went to another Californian boarding school before returning to RADA to join the family business. "In their late teens, twenties, children carry resentments towards their parents... Do I now as an adult resent my mother not being there? No. There comes a point where you have to let it go and say that's the way it is. Also, when you have kids, it's like, 'Oh, I see, it wasn't as easy as I thought.'"
