Biography of Michael Redgrave :- Before being interested in acting, Roy Redgrave, a pioneer of Australian silent film, worked as a journalist and teacher. He debuted in theater in 1934. In his early years on stage he wrote The Seventh Man and Circus Boy.
In 1935 he married Rachel Kempson, with whom during his fifty years of marriage he had three children, actor Corin Redgrave and actresses Lynn and Vanessa Redgrave.
Biography of Michael Redgrave
- Born:- 20 March 1908, Bristol, United Kingdom
- Died:- 21 March 1985, Denham, United Kingdom
- Height:- 1.9 m
- Spouse:- Rachel Kempson (m. 1935–1985)
- Grandchildren:- Natasha Richardson, Joely Richardson
His first film role was provided by Alfred Hitchcock in The Secret Agent (1936), in which he played a small casting role.
See Also: Biography of Alberto Closas
Two years later, Hitchcock relied on him again, this time to star in Alchemy in the Express (1939), in which Redgrave played a young specialist in folk music who helps Margaret Lockwood investigate a strange disappearance on a train. Alarm on the express is Redgrave’s first major film and was a huge boost to his career.
In the forties and fifties he became one of the best-known faces of British cinema. One of his best interpretations of these years is the one of the chilling ventriloquist of the classic Nightfall (1945), film of episodes directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, Robert Hamer, Basil Dearden and Charles Crichton.
The captive heart (1946), a war drama directed also by Basil Dearden, was another of Redgrave’s greatest hits with his extraordinary rendition of a Nazi officer infiltrated into an English prison camp.
He was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor for his next film, Mourning becomes Electra (1947). Her co-star, Rosalind Russell, was nominated for Best Actress in this adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s homonymous work written and directed by the great screenwriter Dudley Nicholls.
His privileged position within the British industry allowed him to collaborate with the best directors of the moment, like Carol Reed, the brothers John and Roy Boulting, even with the own Fritz Lang in Secret behind the door (1948), one of the moments more Low of the German race. But it is Anthony Asquith who got the best of Redgrave as an actor, especially in The Browning version (1951).
His characterization as a strict teacher of classical languages was awarded at the Cannes Film Festival, as well as the extraordinary script by playwright Terence Rattigan, adapted from his own work.
The next film by the actor and director was another theatrical adaptation, The Importance of Being Earnest (1952), one of the best representations of a work by Oscar Wilde on the big screen and another of his most remembered works as an actor.
From the sixties, Michael Redgrave reduced more and more the number of his appearances in the cinema to devote himself to his great passion, the theater.
His relationship with the world of the scene was not limited to his cinematographic adaptations: throughout his career produced and directed numerous works and in 1959 wrote an adaptation for the scenarios of Henry James’ short novel “The Apsern papers”.
He published the first volume of his memoir, Mask or Face: Reflections in the Actor’s Mirror , and a novel, The Mountebank’s Tale in 1959, and that same year he was named Knight of the British Empire.
The most outstanding cinematographic roles of this last period of his artistic life are alternated with food works in irregular international co-productions.
Nevertheless, his versatility and his elegant presence allowed him to participate in great films like Suspense (1961), of Jack Clayton, or the solitude of the corridor of bottom (1962), of Tony Richardson, one of the great directors of the nascent Free cinema English.
After participating in Joseph Losey’s The Messenger (1971), and Nicholas and Alejandra (1971), by Franklin J. Schaffner, Sir Michael Redgrave almost retired from the screens to devote himself to theater and literature. In 1983 he published the second volume of his memoirs, In my mind’s eye . Two years later he died at his house in Denham.
