Vanessa Redgrave settled herself, long legs crossed at the ankles, opposite The Guardian’s Michael Billington for this enjoyable evening of talk and film clips. Her demeanour gave us a subtle hint that this was to be a carefully crafted performance by a woman used to keeping her private life just that.
Vanessa’s professional life was a different matter, though, as she threw open the doors on the secrets to her on-screen success. What Michael described in his introduction as her “divine gift,” she went on to reveal as anything but - great screen acting comes simply from putting all your trust in the director.
Working with such towering talents as director Michelangelo Antonioni in Blow-Up (1966) underlined the value of her dance training, as she had to follow complicated instructions on where to look and what expressions to adopt.
“I did exactly what Antonioni told me,” she said. “He knew that it is the colours, the movements that tell the story.”
She also flew in the face of Stanislawski by admitting to, “playing in the ‘now’ in film”. It’s important, she explained, to really understand the person you are portraying, but you don’t need to go into their history. “You have to look inside the lock inside the character and find the key to it,” was how she described getting to grips with such demanding roles as Isadora and Julia.
“I believe that films make a difference – a small, but a vital one,” she concluded, before fielding several pretty dull, self-interested audience questions with practiced tact and aplomb.
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