|
Redgrave Michael
Life Time
20 March 1908 - 21 March 1985
|
The son of silent film actor Roy Redgrave, Michael Scudamore Redgrave was born on March 20, 1908 in Bristol. He was educated at Clifton College and Cambridge University. After graduating from Cambridge, he taught at a high school in the County of Surrey, participated in amateur performances, and in 1934 made his debut on the London theater stage as a professional actor. His first films were Alfred Hitchcock's Secret Agent (1936) and The Lady Disappears (1938). He also starred in three early films
more
The son of silent film actor Roy Redgrave, Michael Scudamore Redgrave was born on March 20, 1908 in Bristol. He was educated at Clifton College and Cambridge University. After graduating from Cambridge, he taught at a high school in the County of Surrey, participated in amateur performances, and in 1934 made his debut on the London theater stage as a professional actor. His first films were Alfred Hitchcock's Secret Agent (1936) and The Lady Disappears (1938). He also starred in three early films by Carol Reed: Rising Higher, Stars Looking Down (1939) and Kipps (1941, by H.G. Wells). The ability to reveal the psychology of his characters, whether it be the lighthouse keeper in Storm Rock (1942, dir. Roy Bolting), the paranoid ventriloquist in Alberto Cavalcanti's novella in the thriller Deep Night (1945) or dandy Ernest Worthing from the adaptation of Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest (1952, dir. Anthony Esquit), became a hallmark of Michael Redgrave's acting talent. During his stay in the United States in 1947-48, he starred with Dudley Nichols in the adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's play Mourning for Electra's Face (1948), for which he was nominated for an Oscar in the category "Best Actor" and in the film "The Secret Behind the Door", the famous German director Fritz Lang. Among Redgrave's other best-known acting work are the schoolteacher in Browning's Version (1951, Cannes Film Festival Prize) and the complex psychological role of an alcoholic writer trying to overcome his ailment in Joseph Losi's Ruthless Time (1956).
Being a well-known film actor, Redgrave continued to work in the theater - he wrote and staged several plays, and in 1959 for merits in the field of theatrical art was awarded a knighthood. Michael Redgrave can be considered the founder of a professional family dynasty - his children from marriage to actress Rachel Kempson: daughters Vanessa, Lynn and son Corin, and their offspring: Natasha and Joelie Richardson, Gemma Redgrave, all of them became movie actors. He continued to act until the mid-70s; his last films were adaptations of English classical literature - "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (1973, television, according to Robert Lewis Stevenson) and "The Tale of an Old Navigator" (1976, based on a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge). During his life he wrote several books - two of them, "The Ways and Means of an Actor's Work" and "The Mask or Face" were devoted to acting, the novel "The Story of a Jester" and the autobiographical "In My Mind's I". He died in 1985 in Denham, Buckinghamshire.