One rung below greatness
Jonathan Cecil
SECRET DREAMS: A BIOGRAPHY OF MICHAEL RED GRAVE by Alan Strachan Weidenfeld, £25, pp. 484, ISBN 0297607642
Actors' biographies, once a comparative rarity and usually ghosted and bowdlerised, spring forth every season. They are often pruriently, dubiously, sensational: we are told that Olivier had an affair with Danny Kaye, that Peggy Ashcroft was a near-nymphomaniac and Alec Guinness a covert gay cruiser, all with scant evidence and with little relation to their art. What a relief to read a sober biography of a distinguished player, Michael Redgrave, largely concentrating on his acting although not shirking the fact that he was a promiscuous, often guilt-ridden bisexual with a one-time flirtation with Stalinism.
Alan Strachan's book — all the better for being written by an experienced man of the theatre — has two main agendas; first to give Redgrave his proper due as a major actor — his name not often nowadays linked with Richardson's, Olivier's or Gielgud's — and secondly to dispute the obituarists' notion that Redgrave, the Cambridge graduate and sometime schoolmaster, was a coldly intellectual rather than emotional actor.
Curiously enough, apart from Gielgud with his Terry connections, Michael Redgrave came from the most thoroughly theatrical family of all the knights. Normally one dreads the opening chapter of such a book, painstakingly tracing the protagonist's roots, but the description of Roy Redgrave, the womanising, barnstorming, bigamous actor-father whom Michael never knew, and his mother Daisy, the captivating actress, is as riveting as anything else in the book, with its admirable evocation of the world of touring and cheap digs. Daisy, who had a sad, dipsomaniac decline — sonic said partly owing to jealousy of her son's success — remarried respectably and Michael was sent to Clifton College, later going on to a golden period at Cambridge. After a short time as a schoolmaster, Michael's launch into the theatre appears charmed from the start, A successful period at the Liverpool Playhouse — then, with Birmingham's, the top repertory theatre in this country — led to his being spotted by `Binkie Beaumont, soon to be our top impresario. He met his future wife, Rachel Kempson, at Liverpool and theirs was a happy if flawed marriage with three hugely successful children and later successful grandchildren. At school and Cambridge he had had affairs with men, although losing his virginity to a woman. When Rachel was pregnant with their first child Vanessa, Michael, the glamorous Old Vic juvenile, was having a passionate affair with Edith Evans: after this he had an affair with Noel Coward. Aware from the start of Michael's bisexuality, Rachel eventually found solace in an affair with Glen Byam Shaw, married to Angela Bad&ley but himself a bisexual and former lover of Siegfried Sassoon, It was difficult to write this last paragraph with a straight face, but it is a measure of Alan Strachan's sympathy with his
subjects that the complications of bisexuality, for those of us who have never known the condition, emerge as pitiable rather than comic or sordid. Michael's devotion to Rachel, a charming, stoical woman as I know from having worked with her, was continually sidetracked by serious or casual homosexual attachments. I finished the book feeling that Michael's infidelities were a sign of sad weakness rather than heartlessness.
At this point I must slightly part company with Alan Strachan. When I was 12 I was taken by my stage-struck father to see Shakespeare's histories played at Stratford, Anthony Quayle, rightly called
an underrated figure by Strachan, put on Richard II, the Henry IV plays and Holly V, as thrilling a theatrical experience as I can remember. A canard has emerged dismissing Quayle's regime as being 'School Certificate Shakespeare' as compared with Peter Hall's exciting but no more exhilarating one. Michael Redgrave played Richard II — dubiously homosexual in the history books and certainly no more so in Shakespeare's play — as a prancing queen, which, as Olivier said, was a brave decision but belied the king's dignified end.
In Henry IV Part I he played Hotspur —a heroic part if ever there was one — in a gruff, oafish Northumbrian accent. He was a fine chorus in Henry V, but my childish impression, having seen Olivier's truly heroic virility, Gielgud's saintlike grandeur and Richardson's peculiar moonstruck dignity, was that Redgrave had a disconcertingly weak personality which stopped just short of greatness. Having said this his heartrending Lear and his unsentimental but moving Shylock will remain with me as outstanding Shakespearean performances. He was an excellent character actor: how sad I am not to have seen his Baron in The Three Sisters or his Uncle Vanya: Chekhov was the greatest dramatic explorer of human weakness — something Michael Redgrave, perhaps uniquely, painfully understood. As opposed to his stage acting his screen acting outclassed that of all his rivals. From his charming light comic debut in The Lady Vanishes to such heartbreaking characters as the haunted ventriloquist in Dead of Night, the obsessed scientist in The Dambusters and the repressed schoolmaster in The Browning Version he was always utterly believable. As Strachan says, he was not a particularly English player — he was a great admirer of the French actor and director Louis Jouvet, a devotee in his youth of the German UFA films and a particular fan of Spencer Tracy. I finished this admirable book with a greater admiration for Redgrave than I had before. But after the actor's triumphant early start and middle years the story ends as a sad one. After a nervous first night in The Master Builder at the Old Vic, when Redgrave was drinking heavily though probably already stricken by the Parkinson's disease which killed him, Laurence Olivier's cruel post-performance dressing down of the actor makes painful reading. Redgrave had numerous friends, not by any means all lovers, and their deaths affected him profoundly. If not the greatest actor of the last century he was certainly, complicated as he was, one of the most interesting. Alan Strachan's fine study is highly recommended.
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