Natasha Richardson, the luminous British actress from one of the world’s great acting families whose performances ranged from the high-brow drama “The Handmaid’s Tale” to the lightweight comedy “The Parent Trap” and the Tony-winning Broadway production of “Cabaret,” died Wednesday at age 45.
The wife of “Schindler’s List” actor Liam Neeson and daughter of actress Vanessa Redgrave and the late film director Tony Richardson died at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. She had been hospitalized after suffering a devastating brain injury while skiing Monday.
The actress was taking a lesson with her adolescent sons on a beginner’s run at Mont Tremblant in Canada and was not wearing a helmet in what first appeared to be a minor accident. She initially reported that she was well but soon started to complain of a headache. Hours after the fall, the star of a number of acclaimed stage plays — including roles in “Anna Christie,” “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Closer” — slipped into unconsciousness.
The actress’ most recent film credits came in last year’s “Wild Child” opposite Emma Roberts and 2007’s “Evening” with Meryl Streep, Claire Danes and Redgrave. The “Evening” part was one of a number of recent roles she had had with her closest relatives.
On television, she appeared as a guest judge on the just-concluded season of the cooking show “Top Chef.”
Richardson was born in London on May 11, 1963, into a theatrical family, in addition to marrying Neeson, her second husband, in 1994.
Just before the skiing accident, Richardson was considering a Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music” with her mother, following a highly praised one-night January staging.
Richardson trained at London’s Central School of Speech and Drama, hiding her family connections, and later picked up minor parts in little-known theater and TV productions. In 1985, she made her West End debut, playing the troubled young actress Nina in Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull.”
A year later, Richardson was cast in her first prominent movie role, starring in director Ken Russell’s “Gothic” as “Frankenstein” author Mary Shelley.
Other Deaths
Jack Lawrence, 96, who wrote the lyrics for Frank Sinatra’s first hit recording, “All or Nothing at All,” as well as standards sung by such stars as Dinah Shore and Bobby Darin, died Sunday in Danbury, Conn. Lawrence not only wrote songs, he also co-produced off-Broadway and Broadway performances, became a patron of the arts, and wrote a pair of autobiographies. Even at age 96, he was collaborating on a new song with Quincy Jones titled “Nostalgia.”
Anne Wiggins Brown, 96, the African-American soprano who was the first Bess in George Gershwin’s landmark opera “Porgy and Bess,” died Friday in Oslo, Norway, where she had lived since 1948. After rejection by schools because of the color of her skin, she became at 16 the first black vocalist admitted to New York City’s Juilliard School of Music. Brown is acknowledged as the inspiration that caused Gersh win to keep adding songs for her character, turning “Porgy” into “Porgy and Bess.”
