The Redgraves: A Family Epic - Couverture rigide

One

Their Wedding Days

( 1824–1921 )

D
uring the cold afternoon of Friday, March 20, 1908—in a modest, poorly heated room above a newspaper shop on Horfield Road, in Bristol, England—a twenty-three-year-old actress named Daisy Scudamore Redgrave gave birth to a plump, blond-haired boy. After the newborn’s first cries, a woman who had helped during the delivery asked if Daisy had chosen a name for the baby. “Mother looked across the street and saw St. Michael’s Church,” said Michael Redgrave years later. Daisy’s notebook confirms the choice of name she had made without consulting her husband, an actor who was then in London, a hundred miles away. Recently, he had been absent much of the time.
For the previous three months, obeying her doctor’s instructions, Daisy had accepted no roles in the provincial tours that frequently kept her busy but brought neither wealth nor fame. During her confinement, instead of traveling and meeting with theater managers, she paid her rent by working a few hours each day in the shop beneath her rented room. She had met Roy Redgrave the previous summer, when they began a passionate romance that almost at once resulted in her pregnancy. Roy at first hesitated but then proposed marriage, six months before the child’s birth. Daisy accepted, but the sequence of surprises was just beginning.

Daisy Bertha Mary Scudamore was born on November 13, 1884, in Portsmouth, an island-town on the southern coast of England and a major naval port. She was the last of five children born to George Scudamore, who worked for a shipbuilding company, and Clara Linington, who was forty-five at the time of Daisy’s birth. The girl’s school record was unremarkable, but she had a flair for song, dance and recitation—aptitudes her staid Victorian parents did not encourage.
During a family holiday in Aberdeen at Christmas 1898, fourteen-year-old Daisy appeared in Aladdin, a musical pageant for children. She soaked up the applause and clutched the small bouquets friends offered after the performance; with that, the theatrical die was cast. Already a tall, pretty, vivacious teenager with expressive blue eyes, she had (so she was convinced) a fund of talents that guaranteed a successful career.
The following year, Daisy announced that she wanted to work on the stage—news her parents received in mute shock, as if the girl had proclaimed her intention to work on the streets.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the acting profession was only just beginning to enjoy widespread respectability. Since Elizabethan times, most actors were regarded as little more than rogues and vagabonds. The daughter of the actor-manager Samuel Phelps, for example, was expelled from school in the 1850s when it was learned that her father was an actor, and the wife of the great actor Henry Irving ridiculed him about the shame of his profession, and eventually left him for that reason. As recently as 1889, when she was on the verge of international fame, the actress known as Mrs. Patrick Campbell received a letter from her aunt Kate, pitying her as “a poor unfortunate child . . . yet to learn the shame, the humiliation of seeing yourself despised by decent people” precisely because she was of the theater.
Early in her reign, Queen Victoria had begun to reverse this prevalent contemptuous attitude. An avid playgoer, she invited actors to Windsor Castle, to present scenes from respectable dramatic works. Although she denied herself this pleasure for twenty years after the death of her husband, Prince Albert, Victoria later attended command performances and received leading players in her homes. This appreciation was symbolized in 1895, when Victoria bestowed a knighthood on Henry Irving, the first such honor for an actor. Six more actor-managers received the same honor between 1897 and 1913, first from Victoria and then from her son and grandson, Edward VII and George V.
The national census of 1881 had counted 4,565 actors in Britain. Their number had grown to 18,247 by 1911, and during those three decades, twenty-one new theaters were opened in London’s West End. At the same time, more actors were coming from respectable backgrounds. An actor’s status continued to improve in the public’s estimation: higher classes of society were now depicted onstage; amateur theatricals expanded everywhere; and repertory companies multiplied. For the first time since the Middle Ages, the Church also took an eager and sustaining interest in the theater, and actors were no longer regarded as undesirable companions. In London, the founding of the Academy of Dramatic Art in 1904 (granted royal status in 1920 and henceforth known familiarly as RADA) and of the Central School of Speech and Drama (in 1906) also helped to erase the stigma attached to acting by associating it with education.
In light of the loud parental disapproval of her career plans, Daisy bided her time. But then, around the time of her fifteenth birthday, she packed a small bag, slipped away from home without so much as a farewell, and sought out a London theatrical agent whose name she spotted in a newspaper. When she said her name was Scudamore, the agent presumed that she was somehow related to the noted actor-manager-playwright Fortunatus Augustus Scudamore, and he forthwith suggested that she visit that man’s home in Barnes, a riverside London suburb.
F. A. Scudamore was actually no Scudamore. Born Frank Davis, he had assumed the classical moniker Fortunatus and the venerable surname of a family that could be traced back before the Norman Conquest and included many nobles and landed gentry on various branches of its tree. When he opened the door to the clear-eyed, ambitious Daisy that afternoon late in 1899—and so met someone he thought was an authentic Scudamore—he improvised a little scene that could have been straight from one of his own sentimental plays. “If you are not my daughter,” he cried, welcoming her with a throb in his voice, “then I don’t know whose daughter you may be!” He did not investigate, and she did not elaborate.
That was enough for Daisy, who was delighted to be offered a more obliging family than her own, and one better suited to her professional aspirations. (For decades thereafter, the fiction circulated that Michael Redgrave was the grandson of Fortunatus Augustus Scudamore—a canard Daisy did nothing to suppress.) She had no further contact with her real parents up to the time of her father’s death in 1916 and her mother’s in 1925.
Taken into the house and welcomed by F.A.’s wife and children, Daisy was thenceforth presented to the world as his long-lost niece, while her true Portsmouth parents faded into oblivion. Over the next two years, “Uncle” Fortunatus created roles for her in several of his provincial productions and at London’s Pavilion Theatre, Mile End. After playing small parts in two plays during Sarah Bernhardt’s visit to London, Daisy gave (according to one newspaper) “a pleasing representation of the heroine” in Scudamore’s four-act melodrama The Dangers of London, in which she was required to cry repeatedly to her stage husband, “Kiss me, Percy!” In April 1901 she had better luck with a comedy called Riding to Win: as one critic observed, “her grace and buoyancy have been heightened by a capacity for fun that has proved very diverting.”
But the press took note of Daisy only rarely, and she began to complain that her talents were never fully appreciated. This instilled a certain crusty bitterness that went beyond mere ambition or professional rivalries. Years later her grandson had the impression that Daisy believed in “a charmed circle [that] surrounded the West End theatres, and a kind of freemasonry [that] kept out actresses like herself.” It never occurred to her that there might have been other reasons for her disenfranchisement—the absence of a singular talent, for example.

One day in November 1904, Daisy took sides with Scudamore’s son Lionel in a dispute with his father. Hastily tossing a feather boa around her neck and lifting her head in mute exasperation, she stormed out, as if rehearsing an actor-proof exit scene in a new play. When she returned the next afternoon for some fence-mending, Daisy found the house unaccountably silent. To her horror, she saw her patron and mentor sprawled on the parlor floor, dead of an apparent heart attack at the age of fifty-six.
Davis/Scudamore had left his house and copyrights to his wife and offspring, but for a time his widow continued to support Daisy with small sums, considering her, as she said, “nearly as dear to me as my own children.” This patronage was short-lived, however, for soon the family was overwhelmed with debts and utterly without capital.
But Daisy thrived. By early 1905 she was back in theatrical harness, landing jobs that usually paid one pound a week and scurrying from Cornwall to Scotland, accepting virtually anything on offer. The closest she came to a major role was in a production of Irving’s The Bells at the Savoy Theatre in June 1906—a production in which she costarred with Irving’s son.
In late spring 1907 she appeared in Brighton, in a play called Their Wedding Day. Also in the cast was an attractive actor named Roy Redgrave, whose birth name was George Elsworthy Redgrave. He already had at least one wife, several mistresses and a number of children, but soon Daisy thought that she was his favorite, and she foresaw a long and happy future with him once he obtained a divorce. Well might she have encouraged this rosy dream, for she was soon pregnant with Roy’s child.

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For more than a millennium, there have been Redgraves in England—mostly in and around Suffolk, clustered near the historic market town of Bury St. Edmunds. In 1005 there was a Redgravesthorpe Parish, a designation meaning “a family settlement in a grove of reeds.” Because variant spellings were common until modern times, the surname eventually took almost as many forms as there were generations, and some of these are still widely scattered over the British Isles—among them Redgriff, Redgrove, Redgrough and Radgrave.
Roy’s great-grandfather, Thomas Redgrave, was a prosperous shoemaker in Northampton, where the leather industry flourished. He and his wife, Mary, had twelve children, of whom the seventh, born in 1824, was at least tangentially involved in the entertainment world. As “Cornelius Redgrave, Tobacconist,” he set up shop in London near the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, famous for theatricals since 1663. Sensing a lucrative if somewhat shady means of augmenting his income, Cornelius became one of the first ticket brokers: anonymously, he bought blocks of seats for the nearby spectacles and then sold them at extortionist rates to eager playgoers. “He was one of the first theatrical racketeers,” said Michael Redgrave years later.
George Augustus Redgrave, son of Cornelius, moved the clan a step closer to dramatic legitimacy when, in 1872, he married the actress Zoe Beatrice Elsworthy Pym, whose credits included appearances at the Lyceum with the noted Anglo-French classical actor Charles Fechter. George and Zoe’s son, George Elsworthy (later Roy) Redgrave, was born in Kennington, South London, on January 11, 1873—the first of five children born in eight years. He and his sister Dolly, with their parents’ hearty encouragement, “took to the stage even as youngsters,” as Roy recalled, describing their apprenticeship in local amateur dramatics.
His father’s death at the age of thirty, in 1881, compelled eight-year-old Roy to work as a barber’s assistant to help support the four younger children, while Zoe traveled with an acting company. In 1897 she had enormous success in a revival of Douglas Jerrold’s perennially popular comedy Black-Eyed Susan, at the Empire, Croydon. She married a second time, and Roy began to pursue a career in acting; one of his brothers, Christopher, became stage manager of the Surrey Theatre.
Roy was a handsome and athletic young man, five feet nine inches tall, with light brown hair, sparkling blue eyes and considerable charm. He became an expert at every kind of theatrical stunt, at fencing, at staged fights that seemed perilously authentic—and, offstage, at the craft of seduction, a talent he practiced with a legion of women. Roy appeared in a West End theater only once, but from the 1890s he was much hailed as a character actor at the Britannia, Hoxton—hence his billing as “The Dramatic Cock of the North,” i.e., North London’s most popular player.
In 1894 Roy Redgrave married Ellen Maud Pratt, who became an actress and prudently changed her name to Judith Kyrle. Her wealthy father provided a generous dowry and a comfortable home, and between 1895 and 1898 she bore three children. But for Roy, marriage did not mean domesticity: Judith deeply resented his ongoing philandering, which he made little effort to conceal. He was often away from home, acting wherever good roles were available and wherever he could find compliant female companionship.
In 1903 Roy met another actress, Esther Mary Cooke, whose family was part of a successful circus troupe in the English provinces. After descending from the trapeze to the stage, she, too, changed her name, to Ettie Carlisle, and somehow she landed a role in a play starring Roy Redgrave. In short order, two things occurred: Ettie and Roy began to live together as lovers, and Judith Kyrle went on the warpath, breathing scorn and threatening to ruin the careers of both her husband and his mistress. Roy told Ettie he would terminate his marriage so that he could wed her, but she was terrified of being hauled into court as corespondent in a divorce case.
Instead, Ettie signed on with a drama company headed for South Africa, where on November 1, 1903, at St. George’s Cathedral, Cape Town, she married the actor William Arthur Parrett, known professionally as Cecil Clayton. Roy, however, was not to be so easily rejected. He followed Ettie, resumed his pursuit, and persuaded her to return with him to England. It took the abandoned Parrett some months to trace his wife and initiate divorce proceedings.
Back home, Roy lost no time finding work. He successfully played the notorious outlaw Captain Starlight in a stage version of the classic Australian novel Robbery Under Arms, and soon he had a job at the Standard Theatre, Shoreditch, in The Girl Who Took the Wrong Turning—“an excellent drama with an excellent moral,” according to The Stage. He earned even more enthusiastic notices in A Girl’s Cross Roads: “He played the part of Jack Livingstone with much earnestness, depicting a man cursed with a drunken wife.” In Shadows of a Great City, the positive response continued: Roy effectively portrayed “a dashing sailor hero, giving a touch of true pathos.” These performances were much noticed, as were those he undertook when he returned with Mrs. Parrett on his arm.
And what of Ellen Maud Pratt, aka Judith Kyrle? Writers and Redgraves claimed for decades that she and Roy were never divorced, and that therefore his subsequent marriages were bigamous and the children from them were illegitimate. But the National Archives of the United Kingdom contain a divorce record proving the contrary, dated 1905. The file does not provide the reason for the wife’s petitio...

The dramatic, poignant and revealing saga of the Redgraves, one of history's greatest families of actors.

For more than a century, the Redgraves have defined theater and film while captivating the public eye. Their history is a rich tapestry of singu­larly talented individuals whose influence is felt to this day, yet their story has never before been told. In The Redgraves, bestselling biographer Donald Spoto draws on his close personal relationships with the family and includes both his interviews and un­precedented personal access to them. The result is a groundbreaking account of this extraordinary clan and their circle, including such luminaries as Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, and Sir Laurence Olivier.
 
The story began in 1907 with the marriage of actress Daisy Scudamore to matinee idol Roy Red­grave and the birth in 1908 of their son, Michael, who became a famous stage actor and movie star. Michael’s family and wild social circle knew that for decades he was insistently bisexual, notwithstanding his marriage to Rachel Kempson, one of England’s most glamorous and admired actresses.
 
Their daughter Vanessa, a great and revered per­former, is the only British actress ever to win Oscar, Emmy, Tony, Cannes, Golden Globe, and Screen Actors Guild Awards—achievements that have been paralleled by a profound humanitarian commitment even as she tackled difficult and controversial roles.
 
Vanessa’s sister, Lynn Redgrave, led a triumphant and complex life in her own way, too. From her per­formance in the movie Georgy Girl to her prizewin­ning play about her father and her Oscar-nominated performance in Gods and Monsters, Lynn established herself as a very different Redgrave.
 
Corin Redgrave, their brother, was known for his acclaimed performances onstage and screen—and he was a tireless and outspoken political radical.
 
The family tradition of distinction continues with the careers of Joely Richardson and Jemma Red­grave and reached a high point in the life and career of Vanessa’s daughter, Natasha Richardson, who earned a Tony Award for her role as Sally Bowles in the revival of Cabaret. Natasha’s sudden death after a skiing les­son in 2009 shocked and saddened admirers of her work and graceful spirit.
 
The product of more than thirty years of research, The Redgraves recounts the epic saga of a family that has extended the possibilities for actors on stage, screen, and television in Britain, America, and around the world.