Natasha Richardson was a successful actress and a member of Britain’s most celebrated acting family, a dynasty that included her mother, Vanessa, and grandfather, Michael. A distinguished actress in her own right, Natasha Richardson worked on films with collaborators as varied as Ken Russell, Sam Mendes and Lindsay Lohan, and for a while at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s she was one of Britain’s top film actresses.

But in England she could never escape the long shadow cast by several generations of famous and often controversial relatives.

“It just didn’t matter how much work I did in England, I continued to be seen simply as a Redgrave,” she told one interviewer.” She moved to the US at least partly because the family was not quite as well known or at least as culturally significant there.

She lived in New York with her husband, the Irish film star Liam Neeson — they had homes in Manhattan and up state. And she took a step back from her acting career to spend more time with Neeson and their two sons. In the 1990s she found work locally, on Broadway, and she won a Tony Award for her performance as Sally Bowles in Sam Mendes’s acclaimed 1998 revival of Cabaret, with Alan Cumming.

Ultimately she reached her widest audience in Hollywood blockbusters, playing Lindsay Lohan’s mother in the remake of the The Parent Trap (1998) and a wealthy socialite, whose identity is borrowed by a hotel chambermaid, Jennifer Lopez, in the romantic comedy Maid in Manhattan (2002), which also starred a family friend, Ralph Fiennes.

Born in London in 1963, Natasha Jane Richardson was the elder daughter of Vanessa Redgrave and her first husband Tony Richardson. Her younger sister is the actress Joely Richardson, star of Nip/Tuck (2003-2009). Other relatives include her cousin Jemma Redgrave, her uncle Corin Redgrave and her aunt Lynn Redgrave. Richardson’s maternal grandparents were Sir Michael Redgrave, one of Britain’s most celebrated postwar film actors, and his actress wife, Rachel Kempson. Natasha’s great-grandfather, Roy Redgrave, was a matinée idol in the silent era, and her great-grandmother Margaret Scudamore was also an actress.

Natasha Richardson grew up in the public eye. Six times her mother was nominated for Oscars. She won once, best supporting actress for Julia in 1978. She and her brother Corin came to be as well known for their left-wing politics and support of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party as they were for their acting, and Vanessa Redgrave was booed when she used the Oscars as a political platform in support of Palestine.

Natasha Richardson made her film debut in a small, uncredited role as a flowergirl in a wedding scene in The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), which was directed by her father and starred her mother. By the time the film was released, their marriage was over. It was subsequently revealed that Tony Richardson was bisexual and he died of Aids in 1991. His father-in-law, Michael Redgrave was also bisexual, at a time when such a revelation could ruin a career and end in imprisonment.

Richardson’s childhood was split between her mother, a famously dominating presence, in England and her father in the US, and Richardson later complained of feeling insecure and of “a not very ordered life and not ever knowing what was going to happen next”.

She followed in the footsteps of her mother and aunt to the Central School of Speech and Drama, London, worked at the West Yorkshire Playhouse and appeared with her mother in the West End in a production of The Seagull (1985), winning the London drama critics’ award for most promising newcomer. She had seemingly inherited much of the family beauty, talent and intensity. She played Mary Shelley in Ken Russell’s Gothic (1986). Russell had been enormously important in the British cinema of the 1970s, violently blowing the cobwebs from period drama, and his work still commanded great interest. The cast included Gabriel Byrne as Byron and Julian Sands as Shelley.

Richardson went on to star in A Month in the Country (1987), with Kenneth Branagh and Colin Firth, quickly establishing herself at the forefront of emerging film acting talent. She was cast in the title role of Patty Hearst (1988), playing the iconic American heiress who is kidnapped by terrorists and then joins them.

In 1990 she had starring roles in an adaptation of Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers and in The Handmaid’s Tale, an intellectual science-fiction film, adapted by Harold Pinter from a Margaret Atwood novel and co-starring Robert Duvall and Faye Dunaway. She won the Evening Standard British Film Award for Best Actress for the two films. It was to prove her career high point.

In her early twenties she had begun a long-term relationship with Robert Fox, the film producer and younger brother of Edward and James Fox. He was more than ten years older, and had three children by a previous marriage. She later commented that her father was distressed that she spent so much time looking after the home and children, rather than going to parties. She and Fox married in 1990 but split up a couple of years later.

She played the title role in Anna Christie in 1992 in London, winning the London drama critics’ award for best actress, and then on Broadway, where she began a relationship with her co-star Liam Neeson. In 1994 they were married and worked together again in Nell, playing professionals arguing over the welfare of Jodie Foster’s character, who has been raised in isolation from society. They had two sons over the next two years.

Richardson was determined to give them the stable home life she never had, and her career was put on hold for a while. In the meantime Neeson had a succession of starring roles in such films as Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999), Gangs of New York (2002) and Batman Begins (2005). Latterly however Richardson managed to combine work on Broadway, including Closer (1999) and A Streetcar Named Desire (2005), with supporting roles in the Hollywood blockbusters The Parent Trap and Maid in Manhattan and starring roles in smaller, independent films.

In 2003 she returned to the London stage in a production of Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea. In 2005 she appeared with her mother and her aunt, Lynn Redgrave, in Merchant Ivory’s period drama The White Countess. It fell well short of their previous achievements and flopped at the box office. She also played the bored wife of a psychiatrist who has an affair with a patient in the melodrama Asylum (2005), a film in which she had been actively involved as producer as well. It won her a second Evening Standard Best Actress award.

Natasha Richardson, actress, was born on May 11, 1963. She died after a skiing accident on March 18, 2009, aged 45