Natasha Richardson, The White Countess

You don't get more "family" making a film like The White Countess
if you're Natasha Richardson. The Tony-winning star of Broadway's Cabaret - whose film career started out with her playing Patty Hearst and ranges to last summer's doomed-victim-of-obsessive-love in the sexually-charged Asylum co-stars with her mother Vanessa Redgrave and aunt Lynn Redgrave in Shanghai in what turned out to be the final Merchant Ivory picture. Naturally, Vanessa and Lynn play her relatives. Richardson is married to Ireland's internationally-known Liam Neeson, with whom she has two children. For someone happily married and effortlessly stylish, she has shown a decided penchant for the angst-ridden heroine, ranging from Anna Christie and Blanche DuBois on Broadway to this aristocratic Russian emigre who supports her starving impoverished family by taxi dancing and occasional prostitution. Her character is saved by the attention of Ralph Fiennes' blind American diplomat who opens a nightclub that he names in her honor, The White Countess, and hires her as its hostess (25 minutes).

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