Vanessa Redgrave

Actors' Equity on Friday sided with actress Vanessa Redgrave in a dispute in which she claims she was barred for political reasons from appearing in the national tour of a hit Broadway play. The executive council of the actors' union decided to file a grievance against the producers of "Lettice and Lovage" based on Redgrave's "submission that she was not hired for the proposed tour . . . as a direct result of political statements she made," according to an Equity statement.

NEW YORK - On a cramped stage at the Cherry Lane Theatre, a historic off-Broadway venue tucked away on one of the quaintest streets in the West Village, Vanessa Redgrave is offering her costar Jesse Eisenberg an education not even the world's finest drama school could provide. Eisenberg, an actor best known for his Oscar-nominated portrayal of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg in the film "The Social Network," happens to be a budding dramatist. His new play, "The Revisionist," is one of the scarcest tickets in New York right now, thanks to Redgrave, who is making an American stage appearance away from the bright lights of Broadway (though rumor has it the show may be heading there)

NEW YORK - On a cramped stage at the Cherry Lane Theatre, a historic off-Broadway venue tucked away on one of the quaintest streets in the West Village, Vanessa Redgrave is offering her costar Jesse Eisenberg an education not even the world's finest drama school could provide. Eisenberg, an actor best known for his Oscar-nominated portrayal of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg in the film "The Social Network," happens to be a budding dramatist. His new play, "The Revisionist," is one of the scarcest tickets in New York right now, thanks to Redgrave, who is making an American stage appearance away from the bright lights of Broadway (though rumor has it the show may be heading there)

A life of 'Resistance' Fred Zinnemann directed 21 features. Here's a look at three that are in the Getty Research Institute retrospective: 'High Noon' Gary Cooper's lagging career was resurrected with this 1952 western-as-political-allegory for which he won the lead actor Oscar. 'The Search' Montgomery Clift was Oscar-nominated for his performance in this harrowing 1948 drama about refugee children in Europe after the war. 'Julia' Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave play lifelong friends who become involved in the anti-fascist movement in Germany in this 1977 drama.

Charlton Heston and Vanessa Redgrave are at opposite ends of the political spectrum. But Heston still ranks Redgrave as the world's best actress. "She does a wider stretch of parts, and she takes more chances than any actress alive," Heston said on "The Joan Rivers Show," taped in December for broadcast Thursday. Heston said it is OK with him that Redgrave "makes Jane Fonda look like Herbert Hoover."

An arbitrator has ruled that Vanessa Redgrave was not the victim of political discrimination or "blacklisting" when she lost her job in a proposed tour of the comedy "Lettice and Lovage." The producers of the tour believed that "because of public reaction" to Redgrave's statements regarding the Gulf War, the tour "was no longer economically viable," wrote arbitrator Daniel Collins. But they did not act out of their own "animus to Redgrave's political belief," he concluded.

Vanessa Redgrave speaks to a far window, as if addressing some hidden audience beyond the confines of her hotel suite. There is a minimum of eye contact and her voice--except when talking about 21-year-old daughter Natasha--is a barely audible monotone. Even a line from Shakespeare falls flat. The diction is, of course, exquisite, with dull-sounding words like process, as in "the acting process," coming out a soft, rippling pro- cess.

Vanessa REDGRAVE was 3 years old during the evacuation of Dunkirk, the 1940 rescue operation of British and French troops that is portrayed to gripping effect -- via a panoramic, minutes-long tracking shot -- in the wartime romance "Atonement." "One of my very first memories was eating my breakfast one summer morning, which actually turned out to be August, when the Blitz started," Redgrave said recently.

Bowing to public pressure and an almost total boycott of advance ticket sales, the Haifa Municipal Theater on Tuesday canceled two scheduled performances by British actress Vanessa Redgrave, whose years of militant support for the Palestine Liberation Organization led many here to view her as an enemy of Israel and anti-Semitic.

Vanessa Redgrave does glorious the way other actresses do their makeup. Routinely. Effortlessly. Organically. That Judi Dench has been appointed the current grande dame of English acting has got to be rooted in political default, because when Redgrave appears, all pretenders are cast in shadow. But even she has trouble taking flight while having to drag along the soggy ballast of "A Rumor of Angels," a tepid, cliche-ridden tale of intergenerational friendship, grief and voices from the grave.

"Letters to Juliet" is an ode to romance of the most starry-eyed sort, a sugary paean to quixotic clichés and a film destined to be a guilty pleasure for some (me included, sigh) and the painful price of a relationship for others (so steel yourselves). The starry eyes here belong to Amanda Seyfried, one of Hollywood's favorite ingénues now. But soon enough the movie morphs into a multigenerational romance-Italian road trip with Vanessa Redgrave, Christopher Egan and Franco Nero, to say nothing of certain members of the audience, bitten by the bug. But love doesn't guarantee happy endings, particularly when the tale is tied to Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" and the Verona balcony wherefore the star-crossed lovers he conjured up once cooed.

Art sometimes imitates life. And then again, life often imitates art. Just ask Oscar-winning actress Vanessa Redgrave and her husband, Franco Nero. In the new romantic comedy, "Letters to Juliet," the 73-year-old Redgrave plays a widow named Claire who had left the love of her life, Lorenzo (Nero), 50 years earlier when she was a student in Verona, Italy. Before she had left, Claire did what numerous women in love have done over the centuries, write a letter about her love affair to the Shakespearean heroine, Juliet, and tack it on the wall of the courtyard where the fictional character had lived.

Re "Have piano, will walk," editorial, April 28 Krystian Zimerman again makes us ask "should an artist's politics matter" when he announced that he would no longer play in the U.S. because our military seeks to "control the world." We have lived with this issue for years -- think of Vanessa Redgrave and her patronage of the Palestinians, or Jane Fonda in Hanoi -- and we must attempt to deal with it. How can we be politically independent and still enjoy artistry? The two need not be mutually exclusive.

Vanessa REDGRAVE was 3 years old during the evacuation of Dunkirk, the 1940 rescue operation of British and French troops that is portrayed to gripping effect -- via a panoramic, minutes-long tracking shot -- in the wartime romance "Atonement." "One of my very first memories was eating my breakfast one summer morning, which actually turned out to be August, when the Blitz started," Redgrave said recently.

Britain's most famous acting dynasty is launching a party to promote the human rights it says have been abused in the war on terrorism, the latest foray by the entertainment world into Iraq war politics. Corin and Vanessa Redgrave, renowned for their left-wing activism as well as stage and film performances, will inaugurate the Peace and Progress Party in London on Nov. 27.

Stored in the archives of London's Victoria & Albert Museum are boxes marked "Redgrave" that contain memorabilia of a family of actors that stretches as far back as the 18th century. Among the ephemera are books, portraits, letters and programs associated with, among others, Roy Redgrave, the self-styled "Dramatic Cock o' the North," who played London's Sadler's Wells in 1902 and later became a silent-film star.

In 1980, Vanessa Redgrave met Tennessee Williams. The writer, once regarded as the enfant terrible of stage and film, was at a low point in his career and, recognizing a kindred spirit in Redgrave, he hoped to interest her in "Stopped Rocking," his screenplay about a woman whose husband had committed her to an asylum. "I thought the script was absolutely superb," Redgrave recalls.

The producer of the forthcoming CBS television film "Second Serve," starring Vanessa Redgrave, is Linda Yellen. The name was given incorrectly in last Saturday's Calendar.

Vanessa Redgrave does glorious the way other actresses do their makeup. Routinely. Effortlessly. Organically. That Judi Dench has been appointed the current grande dame of English acting has got to be rooted in political default, because when Redgrave appears, all pretenders are cast in shadow. But even she has trouble taking flight while having to drag along the soggy ballast of "A Rumor of Angels," a tepid, cliche-ridden tale of intergenerational friendship, grief and voices from the grave.

In 1980, Vanessa Redgrave met Tennessee Williams. The writer, once regarded as the enfant terrible of stage and film, was at a low point in his career and, recognizing a kindred spirit in Redgrave, he hoped to interest her in "Stopped Rocking," his screenplay about a woman whose husband had committed her to an asylum. "I thought the script was absolutely superb," Redgrave recalls.