The House of Redgrave: The Lives of a Theatrical Dynasty

More than seventy years ago, after a performance of Hamlet at the Old Vic, Laurence Olivier stepped out from behind the curtain to announce, 'Ladies and gentlemen, tonight a great actress has been born: Laertes has a daughter.' Her parents had already named her Vanessa.

Between them, Michael Redgrave's children and grandchildren would go on to win four Golden Globes, a Tony Award and an Oscar. Yet just as Prometheus was punished for giving fire to humanity, so the Redgrave family has suffered more than its fair share of the most appalling unhappiness: within just over a year of each other, Vanessa's daughter, brother and sister would die. The Redgrave family story is a febrile mix of ambition, scandal and tragedy that for some of them ends in a remote country churchyard, 80 miles north of Manhattan…