Natasha Richardson - a star who turned our world upside down

I don't know exactly when the word "star" became garish instead of exciting — like glitter on an ordinary dress that only seems to make it more ordinary. But I do know that fact makes it harder to explain the effect of Natasha Richardson. Because I think she actually was one.

I was once at lunch in New York with Tasha and her legendary agent, Sam Cohn. We had just opened the Broadway production of Anna Christie, during which Tasha had significantly upstaged her own Tony nomination by falling in love with her brilliant co-star, and husband to be, Liam Neeson — a fact that did more to ignite the play and fill the theatre than any award (or director) could ever achieve.

As usual with Tasha, the talk was all about the future. And she was spilling over with plans. And then Sam — who I suspect would have appreciated just a few moments to indulge in her recent success — suddenly leaned over and said: "Natasha, do you always have to turn the world upside down?"

Of course she did. That was the whole point.
When I think of Natasha Richardson, I think of someone who had the gift of turning perfectly practical and apparently ordinary things into something energetically lovely. She had no truck with vagueness. Or sentimental self-congratulation.

In fact there was nothing "abstract" about her. No part of her that thought fame would somehow come along because it was "owed" or in the blood or because people ought to love her. Nothing could be less interesting to her than celebrity for its own sake.

She would come to rehearsal and bump into furniture and frequently elbow her coffee cup off the table — creating a small symphony of clumsiness that I must admit completely transfixed me until I realised it was her way of being in the here-and-now and nowhere else. She was in fact a walking challenge to the smoothness and poise that we imagine is the signature of success. And I think it's because she had something far more potent and chaotic up her sleeve than mere charm. Actually she had something absolutely lethal to tabloid excess — which was authentic beauty.

Her first entrance as Anna Christie — edging alone into a bar, concealing her weariness in the hardened shell of the prostitute — was vintage
Natasha. It was not a showy entrance. It was tentative, complicated, unsure and incredibly delicate. And it put the audience exactly where she needed them to be — under arrest. It is a measure of her gift that I can still exactly recall that door on stage opening so quietly, and the precise way her shoes traced a wandering, uncertain map across the floor to the safety of a table. She was all vivid. And she didn't need to ask — or advertise — for your attention, because frankly you couldn't take your eyes off her.
The scene that followed was the one that more or less launched Eugene O'Neill's play out of the orbit of a worthy revival directly to another planet altogether. Tasha standing in her yellow oilskin on the deck of her father's barge as Liam emerged half-naked out of the fog.

I have absolutely no explanation for this moment. Except to say that it came as close to rock'n'roll as I have ever hoped the theatre can be. But when I think of it, I think of one particular detail in Tasha's demeanour — the way her body seemed to shrink inside that yellow oilskin for a moment into a kind of indelible, transparent fragility before she knocked Liam clean to the floor.

That image stays with me now because I think it contains something rather miraculous about Natasha that extended beyond her gift as an actress. And to understand it, you have to understand what it was like to get a phone call from her.

The first sound would invariably be your name uttered in a way that made you feel you were finally being brought back to reality. And then would come the big idea. Because Tasha was not in the business of waiting for things to happen. She was in the business of making things happen. But the odd thing was that she did it in a way that left you feeling you were in charge of something you ought to have thought of in the first place. In other words, she had the gift of altering your world while leaving you at the centre of it. Her special power lay in making people feel empowered. But also challenged.