Actresses: Birds of a Father

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Mod Goddess. All that's exciting in the new cast of cinema characters is prepotently present in Lynn and Vanessa Redgrave. They look, to begin with, like no other actresses currently facing clapper cues—and certainly not like each other. Both are tall, but Vanessa is the taller by a smidgen; at 5 ft. 10½ in., she is the skyscrapingest screen queen in filmsville. (Garbo, though her pressagent insisted that she was only 5 ft. 7, wore flat heels in Grand Hotel but still swayed high above John Barrymore, whose pressagent insisted that he stood 5 ft. 10.) For her height Vanessa is slender: her bust is small, her legs long and elegant; and she moves with the grace of a Watusi dancer—or a high-fashion model. Her lips are thin and subtle, her nose fine, her eyes a cool matte blue. There is something royal in her bearing and at the same time something girlish. The effect is delightfully incongruous. Says Peter Ustinov: "She's a mixture of Harper's bizarre and church bazaar." She is a mod goddess, Eleanor of Aquitaine in a miniskirt.

Lynn, on the contrary, looks like a hockey star trying to look like a movie star. She seems to be bigger than Vanessa and to have more arms and legs—quite nice legs that somehow look sexy even though they are semaphorically knock-kneed. Lynn, continues Ustinov, "gives the impression of knocking things down by mistake because she doesn't know her tail is wagging." She has a kewpie-doll face countersunk in a strawberry-blonde mane; she wears what looks like fluorescent face powder; and she sometimes paints her lower lashes, Twiggy-style, so far below the natural eyeline that people wonder if they need a hairnet. But the eyes look out between the lashes with a wonderful sparkling sanity, and the high excited voice goes burbling on like a Bayswater faucet—it just can't keep anything in.

A Dinosaur & a Colonel. The girls differ in their acting as much as they do in their looks. Lynn, by the very bumptiousness of her nature, seems almost doomed to be a comedienne. She doesn't particularly try to be funny; she just can't help it. She is a madcap mimic who at an instant's notice can turn into anything that stands on two, four or 36 legs. She does an imitation of a dinosaur that would bring Alley Oop on the run, and she takes off a pukka colonel so vividly that the onlooker can hear his imaginary wattles flapping. But what Lynn begins by mimicking she ends by understanding; she works inward from the comic gestures to the tragic core of a character.