Laertes' Daughter

Her ex-husband bugs her bedroom, dynamites her mother, and climbs into a gorilla suit to turn her wedding party into a King Kong-sized disaster. Throughout it all, she remains radiant and ripe, a plum with aplomb that drove the critics wild.

For another actress, the movie Morgan! would have been the top of a career; for Vanessa Redgrave, 29, it has only been a steppingstone to a throne. Next year she will be Queen Guinevere in Warner Bros.' screen adaptation of Camelot, a role that Julie Andrews played on Broadway.

Wearing the crown seems perfectly appropriate for Vanessa; she is a member of the royal family of the English theater. Her father is Sir Michael Redgrave; Lady Redgrave is Actress Rachel Kempson. Her sister and brother are players, as was her grandfather and his father before him. On the night she was born, her career was chosen by Laurence Olivier, who was playing Hamlet to her father's Laertes. Prophesied Olivier in a curtain speech: "Ladies and gentlemen, tonight a lovely new actress has been born. Laertes has a daughter."

Question of Kind. Laertes' daughter never tried to escape the prophecy. When she went to Stratford to watch her father play, she recalls: "Stratford seemed ultimate, and of course I got stagestruck. All those rows of clothes hanging in corridors and the whole atmosphere. . . ." From then on it was only a question of what kind of actress she would be. Her father advised her to go all out for musical comedy: "You can always go into serious theater later . . . after all, Edith Evans didn't start till she was 30." He may have been thinking that her gangling height might hinder her as a serious actress; Vanessa is 5 ft. 101 in., taller than many leading men. It was something she worried about too. Once, recalls Lady Redgrave, Vanessa telephoned her in the country: "She was sobbing great floods. Finally she explained. 'I'm looking in your mirror and I can't see my head.' "

But audiences could, and they liked the blooming English beauty. The hair is russet and gold, the body big but underweight, angular and appealing. What audiences liked critics loved. Her Rosalind in As You Like It was called "the best in history," her Katharine in The Taming of the Shrew "fiery, lovely, right and true."

Undercover Sex. Several years ago, Vanessa became an avid ban-the-bomber, and her name moved out of the theatrical page and into the headlines. She orated at Hyde Park Corner, was arrested at sit-ins, joined a flock of protesting committees. But along the way, she stopped to think things out. She was married now to Director Tony Richardson and had two daughters, Natasha, now 3, and Joely Kim, 1. While she was not about to relinquish her passionately liberal views, she prided herself on being a woman who sorted out her life according to priorities. She was, it was clear, an actress above all, and she realized that she shouldn't speak up on world affairs "just because I'm a celebrity. I loathe the whole thing where writers and actors--especially if they are women--are held up to speak as authorities on everything from birth control to Viet Nam to knee-lengths. Another reason for opting out is that I have acquired a reputation as a 'respectable young dissenter.' Once you get into that category, it's time to stop talking for a while."

Dropping activism for action, she returned triumphantly last month to the West End in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, an inconsequential play about an eccentric schoolmistress, which she manages to make important. Now, with Morgan! a hit in Britain and gathering raves in the U.S., she has become a serious actress, cinema comedienne, smoldering beauty, and rival to Julie Christie as England's most exciting film star. "I always knew I was sexy," says Vanessa coolly, "but until now it was an undercover sort of sex appeal." Her appeal is something more than sex; whatever it is, it is no longer covered.

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