VANESSA REDGRAVE
BIOGRAPHY
Dame Vanessa Redgrave(born in 1937) is an English actress and activist. Throughout her career spanning over six decades, Redgrave has garnered numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Television Award, two Golden Globe Awards, two Primetime Emmy Awards, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, and a Tony Award, making her one of the few performers to achieve the Triple Crown of Acting. She has also received various honorary awards, including the BAFTA Fellowship Award, the Golden Lion Honorary Award, and an induction into the American Theatre Hall of Fame.
Redgrave made her acting debut on stage with the production of A Touch of Sun in 1958. She rose to prominence in 1961 playing Rosalind in the Shakespearean comedy As You Like It with the Royal Shakespeare Company and has since starred in more than 35 productions in London's West End and on Broadway, winning the 1984 Olivier Award for Best Actress in a Revival for The Aspern Papers, and the 2003 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for the revival of Long Day's Journey into Night. She also received Tony nominations for The Year of Magical Thinking and Driving Miss Daisy.
Redgrave made her film debut starring opposite her father in the medical drama Behind the Mask (1958), and rose to prominence with the satire Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966), which garnered her first of her six Academy Award nominations, winning Best Supporting Actress for Julia (1977). Her other nominations were for Isadora (1968), Mary, Queen of Scots (1971), The Bostonians (1984), and Howards End (1992). Among her other films are A Man for All Seasons (1966), Blowup (1966), Camelot (1967), The Devils (1971), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Prick Up Your Ears (1987), Mission: Impossible (1996), Atonement (2007), Letters to Juliet (2010), Coriolanus (2011), and The Butler (2013).
Known very early for her activism, Vanessa Redgrave was an active member of the Committee of 100 in 1961 and its working group. Redgrave and her brother Corin joined the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) in the 1970s. Redgrave used her wage from Mary, Queen of Scots to build a nursery school, near her home in west London. She donated the school to the state.
Since the 1990s, Vanessa Redgrave has also fought against war and for the defense of civil rights. In 1995, she was elected to serve as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. In 2004, Vanessa Redgrave and her brother Corin Redgrave launched the Peace and Progress Party, which campaigned against the Iraq War and for human rights. Most recently, in 2017, Redgrave made her directorial debut with the movie Sea Sorrow, a documentary about the European migrant crisis and the plight of migrants encamped outside Calais, France, trying to reach Britain.
Electric Burma : Amnesty International Ambassador of Conscience Award 2009 to Aung San Suu Kyi
