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By Barry Koltnow
The Orange County Register
July 29, 1998
Three years is a long time in anyone's life. In the life of an actress, it is an eternity.
Audiences can forget you. Studio executives, producers and casting people move on to other faces. Three years of inactivity can end an acting career.
``I was scared. There is no other way to describe it but fear,'' said Natasha Richardson, who took nearly three years off from her acting career to have two children with husband Liam Neeson. ``I wasn't sure anyone would remember who I was.''
They remembered. And now they'll never forget.
Richardson recently won the coveted Tony award for her acclaimed portrayal of sultry chanteuse Sally Bowles in the hit Broadway retooling of the musical ``Cabaret.'' On Wednesday, her new movie, ``The Parent Trap,'' opens amid strong positive reviews.
Both roles were a departure for the tall, long-limbed British actress with the impressive bloodlines, but her foray into musical theater cannot compare to her appearance in a Disney family film.
In ``The Parent Trap,'' a remake of the 1961 Disney classic with Hayley Mills, Richardson plays the mother of twin girls who devise an elaborate scheme to reunite their divorced parents. Dennis Quaid plays Richardson's husband, and newcomer Lindsay Lohan plays the twins, who were separated at birth, each living with a parent without knowing of the other's existence.
Even with his eclectic body of work, Quaid is not really that hard to accept in this type of film. Since the birth of his son, he has looked for roles in family fare so his child can enjoy his movies. But Richardson, 35, is another matter entirely.
The daughter of Vanessa Redgrave and the late director Tony Richardson has never shown a desire to share her acting talents with the family audience. A veteran of the English stage - she started with the role of Nina in Chekhov's ``The Seagull'' - she made her film debut as Mary Shelley in Ken Russell's ``Gothic.'' Her most notable film role to date was the kidnapped heiress in Paul Schrader's 1988 film ``Patty Hearst.''
Not exactly what one would call Disney material.
So why did she decide to make her comeback with a Disney movie? Was it, as it was for Quaid, a decision associated with the birth of her children? Or was it simply a practical decision, picking a major Hollywood studio that has the best chance of producing a popular movie that could introduce her to a wide audience after a long layoff?
According to Richardson, the correct answer is none of the above.
``I know this is going to sound weird and perverse, but being in a Disney film was a downside for me when I was making my decision,'' she said.
``The last thing I wanted to do after nearly three years away from the business was to return in some kid movie playing a mom. I swear it was the script that attracted me. I had never seen or heard of the original movie, and I was enthralled with the story.
``And I had never done this kind of romantic comedy before and the challenge intrigued me. I know I'm not the actress one would think of for a movie like this, but that only made it more of a challenge.
``Katharine Hepburn once said that playing light comedy is like shooting arrows at a target and always having to hit the bull's-eye. Comedy is hard. Either you are right on the bull's-eye, or you've missed it completely.''
Richardson thinks she hit the bull's-eye, and most critics seem to agree with her. But that doesn't mean the Disney experience was always an E-ticket ride.
``I am used to the stage and to small films, where actors are an integral part of the process,'' she explained. ``There were times during this film when I felt like an insignificant part of a huge machine. ``It actually got lonely at times,'' she added. ``I would be standing here in front of the camera while everyone else was way over there in front of a bank of video screens deciding whether the scene was working. An actor can feel like her contribution is insignificant at that moment.
``But that has nothing to do with Disney; that is probably how it is on any major studio film. I'm just not used to it, that's all.''
Richardson said that in moments like that, she worried that she had made a terrible mistake. She thought that perhaps she should have returned to work with a smaller film. Her concern became most acute just before she saw the finished film for the first time.
``It was at a screening in New York and Liam was with me. We also had some of our friends with us. These were our hard-bitten, cynical friends and I didn't know how they would react to a Disney film.
``But Liam got all choked up and our friends thought the movie was really quite moving and charming. I knew then that I had made the right decision.''
Although her parents never pushed her to get into acting, Richardson acknowledges that she probably was destined to walk the boards of the English stage and to grace the big screen with her exquisite beauty. She is a fifth-generation actor on her mother's side.
``I don't think it was necessarily heredity, but osmosis,'' she said. ``I was inspired by their work, and I loved hanging around movie sets when I was a kid.
``I loved that whole world. I loved the way a movie crew becomes an extended family. And I loved the idea of dressing up in costumes and playing a character. I remember being moved by great performances, and often those performances were given by my mother, so I guess you could say she influenced me in that way.''
Richardson, who has two sons (Michael, 3, and Daniel, 1), said her own childhood was generally upbeat, despite the fact that her parents were married only five years. Her parents remained close after the divorce, and her father died of AIDS in 1991.
``I had a good childhood, although I feel I missed some of my adolescence,'' Richardson said. ``My mother always treated me like a small person, so I always had to be terribly grown-up and responsible. That's why I had to express my pain and vulnerabilities through my work. I still do that.''
Her mother was, and still is, politically active, but Richardson said she rebelled against her mother in that way and remained apolitical, at least in public. But she did attend the same school as her mother had and later appeared opposite her in a play.
She appeared opposite Neeson in ``Nell,'' and they are debating whether to star together in a thriller called ``Asylum.''
Until this Disney effort, her films, such as ``The Handmaid's Tale'' and ``The Comfort of Strangers,'' were in the small-budget, relatively high-quality category. Still, her film work clearly has not risen to the level of her stage work, which also included a Tony nomination for ``Anna Christie,'' the play through which Neeson and Richardson fell in love.
``In the theater, if you do many different kinds of roles, people realize that you can do anything. It doesn't work that way in films. That was the hardest lesson for me to learn in Hollywood.
``I thought that if I appeared in all these different roles, then they would see that I could play anything. But they can't see that. They think of me only as that British actress who plays those really serious parts in small films.
``Maybe that will change with this Disney movie,'' she said. ``I just hope it doesn't mean that all they think of me now is the mother. I don't want to play the mother in my next five films. I play the mother at home. That's enough.''
