Flying solo; On the eve of her return to Broadway in Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, Vanessa Redgrave talks to Adam Green about learning to let go.(Interview)

Byline: Adam Green

On a winter evening, I am sitting in a noisy Italian cafe in London across the table from Vanessa Redgrave, who, at almost 70, continues to radiate supernal allure. Her silver hair is pulled back into a ponytail, framing her long face, strong features, and intensely blue eyes. Wearing a low-cut black top and black pants, she is chatting expansively about her life in the theater, making sweeping gestures and puffing on a succession of American Spirit cigarettes. Then I broach the topic of her imminent return to the New York stage, under the direction of David Hare, in Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, a one-woman play based on her unsparing 2005 memoir of loss and grief. "There are two things I absolutely don't want to talk about," Redgrave says in her unmistakably husky, dramatic voice. "The book and the play."

These are hardly the words that an interviewer longs to hear, but at least Redgrave is eloquent about her reluctance to be forthcoming. "I suppose it's a little bit like being a pilot," she says. "When you're off duty, you can talk about all sorts of things, but when you're flying you can't, and I've already begun to take off."

The doyenne of the Redgrave dynasty made her West End debut, at 21, in the mordant comedy A Touch of the Sun, but it was her famously spirited and accomplished Rosalind in As You Like It, a few years later, that really launched her. She has remained airborne ever since, most recently turning in a performance of remarkable humanity as Peter O'Toole's ex-wife in Venus.

The eldest child of the actors Sir Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson, Redgrave originally wanted to be a dancer, but, the six-foot-tall actress says, "for obvious reasons, that was not to be." Onstage, and in her astonishing body of films-from Blow-Up and Isadora to Julia and The Bostonians-Redgrave brings a luminous intelligence to all her roles. She combines the technical polish of classically trained English actors with the emotional honesty of their Method-trained American counterparts, an approach she traces to her father's exacting standards. "At one point, my father became extremely concerned about my conservative-small c-outlook on the theater, which was influenced by the Royal Ballet and Stratford-on-Avon," she says. And so he sent her to New York, to take in the extraordinary 1955-56 Broadway season and to audit workshops at the Actors Studio. "It blew me away," she recalls. "I realized for the first time what theater could be, and my perspective changed absolutely and fundamentally."

With The Year of Magical Thinking, Redgrave-whose previous one-woman turns include Beckett's Not I and Wallace Shawn's The Fever-is returning to Broadway for the first time since her raw and haunting performance as Mary Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night, for which she won the 2003 Best Actress Tony Award. Despite the obvious physical and temperamental differences between the actress and the author, both women are known for their rigor and uncompromising commitment to their vision. They also share a personal history (Redgrave's ex-husband, Tony Richardson, who died of complications from AIDS in 1991, was a close friend of Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne) and a hard-earned knowledge of life's impermanence. "Everyone's world has vanished, whether they realize it or not," Redgrave says.

Didion's book chronicles the terrible year following Dunne's sudden death, in December 2003, and the hospitalization, with septic shock, of their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne. Didion looks back at her marriage and revisits the moment of her husband's death in spare, lucid prose whose formal restraint belies the powerful, turbulent emotions beneath the surface. "I wanted to capture the obsessiveness of going over the scene again and again, hoping to somehow change the ending," she says. Writing turned out to offer a way through her grief. "It was like a fever breaking," she says. ...