What a tragedy....
I didn't really know Natasha Richardson. But twenty years ago I was in a movie with her, Roland Joffe's Fat Man and Little Boy, about Los Alamos and the A-bomb.
I'll always remember her at the opening script read-through, in a room off the bar in our on-location hotel in Durango, Mexico (where Gabriel Garcia Marques would hole up to work sometimes). The space was so small we were practically knee to knee--Paul Newman, John Cusack, Laura Dern, Nastasha Richardson and the like, and the rest of us, some from the New York downtown performance scene (my route ), some actual physicists or academics. This mix of movie star and amateur was a hallmark of Joffe's Ken Loach inspired casting style. I played Edward Teller (I bore a passing resemblance, I hate to say). Natasha Richardson played Robert Oppenheimer's long suffering young mistress.
Naturally, as a ham-prone amateur/newcomer, I was a little overwhelmed to be where I was.
What I will always remember from that read-through is how everyone pretty much walked through their lines...except for Natasha Richardson.
Without fanfare, without a sign of special effort, she gave a performance, there in her chair, that was so heart-touchingly, luminously authentic, so real, you felt you'd intruded into someone's deepest intimacy. I sank down my seat in awe.
I didn't really see her again. She shot her scenes with Oppenheimer (Dwight Schulz from the A-Team) off somewhere.
But this memory of her presence in that room has always stayed with me. She was something special...
and then did a small part from the play Anna Christie - wow! just wow. The emotion was so real it took me a moment to realize they were acting.