Natasha Richardson, who has died, at 45, after a well-reported accident on a Canadian ski resort, was born into it. Natasha, like her sister Joely, was the daughter of the director Tony Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave (who in turn was the sister of Lynn Redgrave and the daughter of Sir Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson). Natasha made her movie debut at four in her father's 1968 The Charge of the Light Brigade, in which her mother played the female lead. After studying at London's Central School of Speech and Drama, Richardson began her career in earnest at the Old Vic, where she played such roles as Ophelia and Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream. In 1986, she appeared with her mother in a production of Chekhov's The Seagull. Although a famous name can help someone get a foot in the door in the entertainment business, it is not automatically a guarantee of a successful career, something that could be attested to by any number of people who probably owe me a dinner for not mentioning their names. But by the time Richardson made her mature movie debut, playing Mary Shelley in Ken Russell's 1986 Gothic, it was clear that she had the talent to back it up. Her first real chance to show what she could do on-screen came in 1988, when Paul Schrader cast her in the difficult title role of Patty Hearst. In her review in The New Yorker, Pauline Kael wrote that Richardson had "been handed a big unwritten role" and added, "She feels her way into it, and she fills it" and "always has something in reserve--you keep waiting for what she may show you next."
In the next few years, Richardson appeared in the movies Fat Man and Little Boy (1989), The Handmaid's Tale (1990), Schrader's The Comfort of Strangers (1990), and Widows' Peak (1994). She also appeared on TV in a 1987 production of Ibsen's Ghosts, and in 1993 in production of Tennessee Williams's Suddenly, Last Summer, the political drama Hostages, and the TV film Zelda, in which she played Zelda Fitzgerald. She also married the producer Robert Fox in 1990. In 1993, she won great acclaim in both London and New York for a production of Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie, in which she co-starred with Liam Neeson. The two were much praises for the intensity of the sexual chemistry their characters displayed, a chemistry that was apparently not entirely, in the words of Jon Lovitz, acting! Richardson, was was divorced from Fox in 1992, married Neeson in 1994. They appeared together that same year in the Jodie Foster movie Nell.
Although Richardson continued to appear in movies, ranging from the 1998 remake of The Parent Trap and Maid in Manhattan to the 2005 Patrick McGrath adaptation Asylum and 2007's Evening, co-starring her mother, she seemed less interested in really pursuing a career than in taking her challenges wherever they appeared. The most notable ones appeared on the stage, where she won a Tony for starring in Sam Mendes's 1998 revival of Cabaret, appeared in the 1999 Broadway production of Patrick Marber's Closer, and played Blanche DuBois in a 2005 production of A Streetcar Named Desire. She also starred in the 2001 CBS miniseries Haven. She was also known as a prominent supporter of charities devoted to fighting AIDS, the disease that killed her father in 1991. She and Neeson had two sons, Micheál, 13, and Daniel, 12.