WHEN Vanessa Redgrave steps into her dressing room at the Plymouth Theater on Broadway during a break in rehearsals for Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night," she exudes frailty, all eyes and bones, her tall frame tottery, her white hair in thin braids. Her deep voice quavers. But it is her hands that are most alarming. They curl inward upon themselves in arthritic fists. Next to Vanessa, her sister, Lynn, is the picture of health. She is currently playing Off Broadway in Alan Bennett's collection of monologues, "Talking Heads," as Miss Fozzard, the buttoned-up store clerk who drifts into a liaison with a foot-fetishist without losing her addled formality.

On this freezing April day, she has breezed into the Plymouth, where "Long Day's Journey" opens on Tuesday, offering cheerful greetings and a hearty handshake, a bright red scarf around her shoulders. Her voice is richly timbered and energetic, her posture that of the equestrian she once was. She couldn't be in sharper contrast to her spectral sister.

Vanessa, 66, is the actor who gouged her scalp with needles and reopened the wounds before they healed when she portrayed the Auschwitz prisoner Fania Fenelon in Arthur Miller's 1980 television movie "Playing for Time." She is famous for her extreme "process." Robert Falls, who is directing "Long Day's Journey," calls her a "compulsive researcher," and an actor who takes the character "to the edge of possibility."

Slowly trying to peel a banana during this dinner break, picking at it with her near-useless hands, she says: "If you wonder why I'm holding things in this very odd way, I'm just practicing keeping my fingers as they're going to be."

Then it becomes clear that Vanessa's ailments are all aspects of her current role — Mary Tyrone, O'Neill's haunted, addicted matriarch. This is Mary, riddled with afflictions, who has wandered out of her Connecticut beach house into an interview.

In fact, it is Lynn, 60, who is fighting a battle for her life. She is six weeks into a two-month course of chemotherapy for breast cancer. Michael Engler, the director of "Talking Heads," said: "I thought she was not being realistic about how taxing chemo is, and I told her to let us know what she needed. But she never did. If nobody had told me she was sick, I wouldn't have known."

She elaborates.

LYNN: It's released me from a kind of head trip I used to do before every show. On opening night, I stood in the wings and I felt free. Why waste an hour, a minute on being anything but glad to do what I adore? I hope I have years and years. But now I put nothing off.

VANESSA (looking at her sister): It's so extraordinary that we're together. I'm beginning to take it in.

LYNN: We thought . . . I thought, I can't believe she's going to do this interview just before opening. But we both feel special about being here together in New York on the stage.

VANESSA (taking Lynn's hand): Yes.

LYNN: So that years from now, somewhere in the archives——

VANESSA: Out there in space——

LYNN: It will be: "Who were they? The Gish sisters?"

VANESSA (laughing): No, not the Gish sisters. The (she rolls the "r") R-r-r-r-r——

LYNN (in mock puzzlement): Joan Fontaine? No, no, no, the Redgra . . . Redgra . . .

(Loud chorus of laughter.)

These sisters have had notoriously public disagreements through the years. Vanessa's firebrand pronouncements led to a spat in 1991, during the gulf war, when they were acting together in a London production of Chekhov's "Three Sisters." Vanessa called Americans "imperialist pigs"; Lynn said she couldn't cope with her sister's politics. They carried on with the play but didn't speak privately for some time.

In Lynn's autobiographical one-woman show, "Shakespeare for My Father," on Broadway in 1993, she described a lonely childhood in which her two older siblings were close to each other but ignored her. One humorously bitter anecdote told of being cast as the dog in a childhood skit in which Vanessa and their brother, Corin, played world leaders.

Newspapers reported that Vanessa and Corin were furious at Lynn for hanging out the family laundry. Which seemed odd, considering that every one of them has written personal memoirs rich with family detail. Corin's "Michael Redgrave: My Father" revealed Sir Michael's bisexuality and long affair with Noël Coward.

"No, my family were wonderful about my play," Lynn asserts. "Absolutely fantastic." It was misrepresented in the press, she said.

Five years later, her personal life was once more in the spotlight. After 32 years of marriage to her manager, John Clark, she left him dramatically. Their son, Ben, had married a single mother, who kept the identity of her child's father secret from both Ben and Lynn. Lynn treated the boy as her grandson. On Thanksgiving 1998, as Lynn was putting the turkey into the oven, Mr. Clark revealed he was the boy's father. Lynn moved out that night, precipitating a clamorous Hollywood divorce.

Both Lynn and Vanessa have been favorite subjects of the press. Especially Vanessa, because of her outspoken support for the Palestine Liberation Organization. During her Academy Award acceptance speech for "Julia" in 1978, pro-Israel demonstrators marched in front of the auditorium. She called them "Zionist hoodlums" on television, provoking a storm of public criticism.

The sisters Redgrave have also waged conspicuous legal battles. In 1981, Lynn sued Universal Television for not allowing her to breast-feed in her dressing room during filming of the CBS sitcom "House Calls." The litigation lasted 13 years. "After all that time," she said, "we lost the suit and I had to declare bankruptcy."

In 1984, Vanessa sued the Boston Symphony, claiming that it had dropped her as the narrator from Stravinsky's "Oedipus Rex" because of her political sympathies. (Her civil rights claim was rejected by a federal jury; she was eventually awarded $12,000 to compensate her for a sum she would have earned in a Broadway role she lost during the suit against the symphony.) In 1991, Vanessa filed a grievance with the League of American Theaters and Producers for canceling her contract to star in the American tour of Peter Shaffer's play "Lettice and Lovage." The producers said her anti-American statements would keep audiences away. An arbitrator subsequently ruled in favor of the producers.

I ask about these situations but they refuse to comment. Lynn says, diplomatically, "We don't like to visit that."

Vanessa's reaction is more acid. "The press, the press," she hisses, pretending to spit.

Surprisingly, the sisters' professional lives have intertwined less than might be supposed. It was 27 years ago that they last acted at the same time in New York: Vanessa in Ibsen's "Lady From the Sea"; Lynn in Shaw's "Mrs. Warren's Profession." Ten years earlier they competed for Academy Awards, Vanessa for "Morgan" and Lynn for "Georgy Girl," losing to Elizabeth Taylor in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"

Throughout the interview, Vanessa has been enveloping Lynn with a gaze so tender that I have wondered whether I am watching an unguarded Vanessa or the emotions of O'Neill's Mary Tyrone, desperate for her family's love. Vanessa and Lynn have each brought up three children; Vanessa's two daughters by the director Tony Richardson, Natasha and Joely, are both actors. But the issue of family life is tricky for performers, since they are so often in the skins of other people and rarely at home.

LYNN: There's a hell of a pull, isn't there? When that job comes and there's also the school play.

VANESSA (theatrically): Oh, heavens yes, agony.

LYNN: But we grew up in a family of actors. So we're used to the fact that chances are Mum and Dad are going to work in the evening when we're going to bed.

VANESSA (sitting up taller): They had to pay for everything we had. It's as simple as that. Sometimes a job came up that got more money, but a lot of it was at the Royal Court, where the money would be zilch. When Dad died, how much money did he have?

(They put their faces close together and lower their voices.)

LYNN: Very little, wasn't it?

VANESSA: It was very, very small.

Sir Michael used to have a terrifying actor's nightmare, in which his greasepaint slid off his face, taking his features with it. His daughters have their own demons.

"The actor's nightmare I always used to have — and please don't let me have it again," Vanessa knocks the wooden table three times for luck, "is that you come to the stage door ready to do a play and they tell you, `It's not that play we're doing tonight.' I hunt for the script, but I can't find it. I haven't the faintest idea what I'm going to do and can't find the one place that tells me!" She pantomimes holding a script.

Lynn's nightmare is different. She is in a production of "A Month in the Country" by Turgenev. "I walk through a door of a Russian house and suddenly I'm in the Colosseum in Rome. And there are huge crowds and I can't be heard. They're yelling, `We can't hear you!' It's awful. They keep yelling, `We can't hear you!' "

"When we were very young," she adds, "we planned to live on a farm together. I don't know where we were going to make our money. We thought we'd have a farm and be in the theater at the same time. The madness of youth. And then time and place separated us. I lived on the West Coast. She lived in England. But these last few years have been the most special——"

Vanessa whispers, "Yes, yes."

Lynn continues: "Because we've found our young selves again. In our older age. And that, that's been——" Her voice breaks. "A miracle."

They are both crying and hugging each other.

"Absolutely, dear heart," Vanessa murmurs. The embrace lasts a long time. When they separate, their eyes are streaming.

*Leslie Garis is writing a memoir about growing up in a family of writers in Amherst, Mass.

Fuente: The New York Times
Mayo 2003