The Redgraves by Donald Spoto

Author:Donald Spoto
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780307720177
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2012-10-01T20:00:00+00:00

NINETEEN-FIFTY-FIVE BEGAN WITH snowfall and a flurry of activities. Michael left for Vienna, to record songs for the movie Oh!… Rosalinda!, a reworking of Die Fledermaus; from there he sent a telegram congratulating Vanessa on her eighteenth birthday. Armed with a collection of acting manuals and a long article her father had published that month, she had just emerged from a week’s study in her room before beginning a three-year program at the Central School of Speech and Drama.*

Since its founding in 1906 by Elsie Fogerty, the CSSD had become one of the finest academies in the world for the study of theater arts, and Fogerty’s methods influenced many teacher-training programs. Bishops sent young clerics to her, and she opened a clinic of speech pathology at St. Thomas’s Hospital, where she treated patients whose voices had been compromised by congenital malformation, illness or trauma. The school emphasized speech training above everything, and that focus remained unchanged even after Fogerty’s death in 1945. All courses supported the primacy of proper elocution: physical training and dance were aimed at correct breathing; fencing was taught to develop rhythmic movement as an aid to coherent speech; and even the classes on costume design and deportment were linked to a study of speech patterns in the history of English drama.

At the Central School, Vanessa was following an impressive list of alumni, among them Laurence Olivier, Peggy Ashcroft, Claire Bloom and Harold Pinter. That year, Judi Dench was one of her classmates; she recalled Vanessa as a shambling, awkward, disorganized figure—too tall, too dependent on eyeglasses, too outspoken in her criticism of old-fashioned teaching methods, and one who gave scant evidence of the treasure buried within. “The only class at which she then excelled was Restoration Monologue,” according to one of her directors. “But it astonished everybody in the school that this chaotic young actor was the only one who could pick her way through this notoriously difficult discipline and make perfect sense.”

On the morning of March 20, Michael’s forty-seventh birthday, Vanessa, Lynn and Corin awakened him with songs and presents. Bob gave him a Dunhill lighter at breakfast, and then Michael went to the airport to meet Rachel, who had concluded the tour of Hedda Gabler. “A very happy day,” he noted in his diary. “R looks well!” Ten days later, Michael was at the airport again, departing for Denmark, where he attended a celebration of the 150th anniversary of Hans Christian Andersen’s birth and read Andersen’s famous story “Grantræet—The Fir Tree,” the tale of a little tree that constantly dreams of future glory but fails to appreciate each happy moment that blooms in its life.

At Michael’s request, R. P. Keigwin, once his house master at Clifton College and then a lifelong friend, translated the tale from Danish to English. Michael’s sixteen-minute reading (preserved in a fine recording) began with a rush of youthful cheer before slowly descending into dark foreboding—a light, clipped, allegro baritone gradually retarding to a bass whisper. In yet another instance

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