Acting through the generations: A very British dynasty

Recovering from her marriage split, Lynn Redgrave investigated the story of her grandmother. The result is 'Nightingale', a play based on the matriarch of the acting clan. Louise Jury reports

They are one of the most famous acting dynasties in the world, but also one of the closest of families. So it is appropriate that the story of the matriarch of the Redgrave clan is not only being told on the stage, but has been written by one of her grand-daughters, who has helped to secure the enduring appeal of the family name.

After Lynn Redgrave's life fell apart seven years ago when she learnt that her husband had fathered a child with their daughter-in-law, she turned to her sister, Vanessa, and mother, the actress Rachel Kempson who has since died.

"I was feeling very vulnerable. I had a new life as a single woman and I was rather clinging to my family," she says.

Jetlagged after the flight to London from her home in America, the star of films including Georgy Girl and Shine embarked on a walk along the river to Chiswick where her maternal grandparents were buried.

What she found there - or, rather, what she did not - proved to be the inspiration for Nightingale, her third play, a one-woman show whose British premiere will be staged at the New End Theatre in Hampstead, north London, next month.

"To my distress, I found that huge numbers of the gravestones had been etched by acid rain and you couldn't read the names," she says. "It made me think about what mark you leave when you die.

"Actors get remembered, writers leave a book, but what about those thousands of people who live their lives and then are gone? There seemed something very poignant to me about that."

Lynn had never really known her grandmother, Beatrice Kempson (known as Beanie) who died when she was about 16.

But she decided to take the "few intriguing fragments", the little anecdotes her mother had passed on, as the inspiration for her writing. Renamed Mildred Asher for the stage, her story is one of frustrations and limited opportunities.

Born in the late 19th century, Mildred knows little about sex when she enters into what proves to be an unhappy marriage. She has a son, on whom she dotes, and a daughter of whom she seems less fond.

Much of this was also true of Beatrice Kempson, who has been described as a neurotic beauty in a quarrelsome marriage to the headmaster of the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, Devon. Until her disastrous honeymoon at the George V Hotel in Paris, she, too, knew nothing of sex.

She was not close to her daughter, Rachel, but was devastated when Robin, one of her two sons, died in the Second World War. "That probably is the most accurate part of the play," Lynn says.

"She was not a woman you could get to know. She seemed so cool, so incapable of showing love. And yet there were just tiny fragments I gleaned from my mother that showed there was a real heart beating under there.

"It wasn't her fault. She grew up very much the product of an age where your parents didn't hug and kiss you. It was all a bit cold and chilly. She was not a good mother to my mother."

It certainly made it easy for Rachel to leave home. Taking the route which an aunt, Maud, had longed for but been forbidden to pursue, Rachel escaped to Rada and entered the world of theatre and film.

"I'm hesitant to be a pop psychologist but certainly theatre is another form of family, that's for sure," Lynn says. "All of us in theatre do love the camaraderie of it."

Rachel's marriage to the actor Michael Redgrave produced another three actors, Vanessa and Corin, both passionately political as well as gifted, and Lynn herself.

A further generation followed in the form of Natasha (who is married to Liam Neeson) and Joely, Vanessa's children by the director Tony Richardson, and Jemma, one of Corin's clan.

It is an extraordinary acting dynasty but "in many ways we're not so different", Lynn says. "My family appears to be perhaps more colourful, because you've heard about us and we dress up for a living." Nightingale is not the first time she has written about them. "I write about extensions of family because you have to start with what you know - or at least I do. It's not really of interest to me to look up some historical figure and spin a tale."

Her mother inspired a play called The Mandrake Root. And her first stage work, which was devised 14 years ago, was Shakespeare for my Father, which she described as a search for her father, one of his generation's great theatrical knights.

"People seem to identify with these works. I wrote a specific story [in Shakespeare for my Father] but a child's search for a relationship with a father or a parent is a universal condition.

"Mildred lived in another time but things have not changed so greatly. The dilemma of where a woman fits in the world is a dilemma so many women have, even modern women.

"Mildred gets married to a man she doesn't know very well because she doesn't want to be stuck at home being the youngest child looking after her parents.

"We do have careers now but it still always seems to be women who make sacrifices."

Though the inspiration for the play was the visit to the graveyard, the motivation for writing it came from a friendship.

Lynn decided she wanted to showcase the talents of Caroline John, an actress Doctor Who fans will recall playing the role of the scientist Liz Shaw.

The two first met in 1959 when Caroline took the younger actress on her introductory tour of the Central School of Speech and Drama and they have stayed great friends ever since.

"At about the time when I couldn't find my grandparents' graves, I knew that Carry was going through what many of us, particularly women, find in the theatre and showbusiness in general, that there comes a point when you're no longer given the great stretching roles," Lynn says.

She began work on creating just such a role for Caroline in Nightingale which received its American premiere in San Jose, California, in 2002, the year Lynn discovered she had breast cancer.

It was Caroline who helped her through the trauma. "She was at the hospital with me and stayed with me when I was getting over surgery." Five months later, Caroline was diagnosed with cancer too. But, now recovered, she is thrilled to be reprising the show in which she ages from 11 to 80. It was "the most wonderful gift" from a "most amazing writer", she says.

"She pulls out of the bag specific things that either make you fall about laughing or twist your heart a bit. She's written about an unfulfilled woman who can be quite nasty about her husband and daughter, but you understand why she has become like this.

"What generosity to hand it to another actress. I just want to do her proud."

Lynn herself will be unable to see it as the opening coincides with her first performance as Lady Bracknell in a new tour of The Importance of Being Earnest being directed by Sir Peter Hall in the United States.

But nearly all of the family have requested tickets and it is hoped that even Corin, who was very ill after suffering a heart attack last year, will attend.

"The New End really wanted to do it and it seemed that a Nightingale in the hand was worth two in the bush," Lynn said.

Nearly three years since the 62-year-old star recovered from cancer, she says she is feeling good, and determined to make the most of the life she nearly lost. "During the year I was going through treatment, I wouldn't have put money on me talking to you now. So I want to use the time I have in a creative way, both to act and to write.

"And because I'm getting older and had my own brush with mortality, I'm more fascinated with where the mind can take you," she says.

"I'm often amazed by what comes out. I have a steel-trap memory for sights and sounds, for hearing certain things said.''

She adds: "Certain behavioural things about people stay in my mind. I'm like a magpie putting brilliantly coloured things away for my nest."

The critics will rule on the results on 20 January, but Lynn seems content to have got the work this far. "To be able to write for my dear friend, to give her the opportunity she ought to have, gives me so much satisfaction."

Nightingale by Lynn Redgrave is at the New End Theatre, London, from 17 January to 18 February.