Tributes have begun to pour in from across the show business generations for Natasha Richardson,the Tony Award-winning actress who died after suffering a head injury on a ski slope.
"She was a wonderful woman and actress and treated me like I was her own," said LindsayLohan, who as a preteen starred with Richardson in a remake of "The Parent Trap" in 1998. "My heartgoes out to her family. This is a tragic loss."
Richardson, who fell during a private ski lesson Monday at a ski resort in Quebec, wasseemingly fine afterward. But about an hour later she complained that she didn't feel well.
The 45-year-old actress was hospitalized Tuesday in Montreal and later flown to ahospital in New York. Alan Nierob, the Los Angeles-based publicist for Richardson's husband, LiamNeeson, confirmed her death Wednesday without giving details on the cause.
Neeson and Richardson's sister, actress Joely Richardson, were seen leaving Lenox Hillhospital Wednesday. Actress Lauren Bacall also visited the hospital.
Richardson's career highlights included the film "Patty Hearst" and a Tony-winningperformance in a stage revival of
"Cabaret."
Descended from at least three generations of actors, Richardson was a proper Londoner whocame to love the noise of New York, an elegant blonde with large, lively eyes, a bright smile and ahearty laugh.
Jane Fonda on Wednesday recalled meeting a young Richardson on the set of "Julia," the 1977film Fonda starred in opposite Richardson's mother, Vanessa Redgrave.
"She was a little girl but already beautiful and graceful. It didn't surprise me that shebecame such a talented actor," Fonda recalled on her blog. "It is hard to even imagine what it mustbe like for her family. My heart is heavy."
As an actress, Richardson was equally adept at passion and restraint, able to portraybesieged women both confessional (Tennessee Williams' Blanche DuBois) and confined (the concubinein the futuristic horror of "The Handmaid's Tale").
Like other family members, she divided her time between stage and screen. On Broadway, shewon a Tony for her performance as Sally Bowles in a 1998 revival of "Cabaret." She also appeared inNew York in a production of Patrick Marber's "Closer" (1999) as well as 2005 revival of TennesseeWilliams' "A Streetcar Named Desire," in which she played Blanche opposite John C. Reilly's StanleyKowalski.
She met Neeson when they made their Broadway debuts in 1993, co-starring in "Anna Christie,"Eugene O'Neill's drama about a former prostitute and the sailor who falls in love with her.
The New York Times critic Frank Rich called her "astonishing" and said she "gives what mayprove to be the performance of the season."
Her most notable film roles came earlier in her career. Richardson played the title characterin Paul Schrader's "Patty Hearst," a 1988 biopic about the kidnapped heiress for which the actressbecame so immersed that even between scenes she wore a blindfold, the better to identify with herreal-life counterpart.
Richardson was directed again by Schrader in a 1990 adaptation of Ian McEwan's "The Comfortof Strangers" and, also in 1990, starred in the screen version of Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid'sTale."
She later co-starred with Neeson in "Nell" and with Mia Farrow in "Widow's Peak." More recentmovies, none of them widely seen, included "Wild Child," "Evening" and "Asylum."
Richardson was born in London in 1963, the performing gene inherited not just from herparents (Redgrave and director Tony Richardson), but from her maternal grandparents (MichaelRedgrave and Rachel Kempson), an aunt (Lynn Redgrave) and an uncle (Corin Redgrave). Her youngersister, Joely Richardson, also joined the family business. She also is survived by two sons,Micheal, 13, and 12-year-old Daniel.
Friends and family members remembered Natasha as an unusually poised child, perhaps forced togrow up early when her father left her mother in the late '60s for Jeanne Moreau. (Tony Richardsondied in 1991).
Interviewed by The Associated Press in 2001, Natasha Richardson said she related well to herfamily if only because, "We've all been through it in one way or another and so we've had to bestrong. Also we embrace life. We are not cynical about life."
Her screen debut came at age 4 when she appeared as a flower girl in "The Charge of the LightBrigade," directed by her father, whose movies included "Tom Jones" and "The Entertainer." The showbusiness wand had already tapped her the year before, when she saw her mother in the 1967 filmversion of the Broadway show "Camelot."
"She was so beautiful. I still look at that movie and I can't believe it. It still makes mecry, the beauty of it," Richardson said.
She studied at London's Central School of Speech and Drama and was an experienced stageactress by her early 20s, appearing in "On the Razzle," "Charley's Aunt" and "The Seagull," forwhich the London Drama Critics awarded her most promising newcomer.
She and her mother acted together, most recently on Broadway to play the roles of mother anddaughter in a one-night benefit concert version of "A Little Night Music," the StephenSondheim-Hugh Wheeler musical.
Before meeting up with Neeson, Richardson was married to theater and producer Robert Fox,whose credits include the 1985 staging of "The Seagull" in which his future wife appeared.
She sometimes remarked on the differences between her and her second husband - she from atheatrical dynasty and he from a working-class background in Northern Ireland.
"He's more laid back, happy to see what happens, whereas I'm a doer and I plan ahead,"Richardson told The Independent on Sunday newspaper in 2003. "The differences sometimes get in theway but they can be the very things that feed a marriage, too."
