Co-founder (with Rachel Kempson) of the Redgrave dynasty (which includes
daughters Vanessa and Lynn and son Corin), educated at Cambridge where
he wrote film reviews, and a member of John
Gielgud's famous Old Vic theatre company from 1937, Redgrave claimed
an ambivalence about his success in the cinema, insisting that he only
ever took his debut lead role in Alfred
Hitchcock's The
Lady Vanishes (1938) because he had a family to support.
Ambivalence may be the key to his persona. Never an aggressively romantic
hero, nor quite one of the league of post-war chaps, the character which
Redgrave projected simply seemed unsure of himself and looking for something
else - either out of idealism or discomfort. This might express itself
through a frustrated passion, as in the socially idealistic but domestically
inept mine-worker's son of The
Stars Look Down (1939), the excruciating distraction of Barnes Wallis
in The Dam Busters
(1955), or the eccentric dithering of his lighter roles, The Lady Vanishes
for example. Though he may have been doubtful about cinema, apparently
finding it suspiciously easy, Redgrave's later filmography does not
reveal quite so many embarrassments as those of some of the other theatrical
knights.
