Actresses: Birds of a Father

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The glamor and the clamor of it all got to Lynn, and one day she decided that horses really were not the answer. When Vanessa turned down a minor part in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Lynn jumped at the chance to play it. In 1963, Olivier took her on at the National Theater, and she found that she could play for pathos (Brecht's Mother Courage) as well as waddle through twaddle (Coward's Hay Fever). Big things were expected of her—but not quite the sort of big things that actually happened.

Naked down Piccadilly. As usual, everything happened to Vanessa first. Offered a part in Morgan!, she decided to take a stab at pictures. The public got the point all right. To Vanessa's amazement, millions acclaimed her as the most exciting thing the British had produced since radar. Director Antonioni, casting for a British actress to play in Blow-Up, had heard about Vanessa. "I had not met her before," he recalls, "but I looked at stacks of her photos and concluded that she was the one I wanted. But I didn't know if she really would accept the part. After all, it wasn't a very big role, and she would have to strip down to the waist. She didn't have the slightest hesitation about that undressing part." Pressagents got into the act, of course, and reported that Vanessa had offered to "walk stark naked down Piccadilly for Antonioni." With some acerbity, Vanessa retorts that she "never said such a rubbishy thing."

She took the part because it was challenging and because she admired the director. In turn, Antonioni taught her the basic lessons every film performer has to learn: how to respond to the camera as to another person in a room, how not to act but react. He wrote her a marvelous part. She was cast as a woman without qualities, an embodied enigma. The spectator knows only that she was an accomplice to a murder. Otherwise he knows nothing about her except what he chooses to imagine, and her job was to make the imagination seethe. She did it superbly. She leaped through the picture like a leopard through a glade. She was glimpsed, she was gone: ulterior and magical, the eternal puzzle of the passerby.

Lynn meanwhile had another feast on the crumbs from Vanessa's table. Just before Blow-Up came along, Vanessa had backed out of a commitment to play Georgy Girl. (It was just as well, since the script says that Georgy "looks like the back of a bus.") Offered the part, Lynn grabbed it and put on 18 Ibs. of omnibustle. The Redgrave rampage was on.