I don't quite know where to put this one.
She could be a wonderful actress. Not always. Her career included some great and awarded moments, but she was, first and last, a working actress, not an acting legend.
Her family's history matters... but does it really?
Her passing, coming as it has off of a minor fall on a bunny slope, has a randomness about it that is both shocking and so very not, in a world where people still die of starvation for the lack of a few dollars a month.
One cannot help but to feel terrible for those who were a part of her life, from the mother who gave her life to the children she gave life to, and to all of those whose life she touched in between.
I'm 45, I've hit my head less significantly than happens on any single play in an organized tackle football game, and now I am dead. On some level, it's breathtaking. And yet, as we watch the media try to find a place for this... desperately unable to... pathetic in its fumblings... embarrassing the highest ranks of doctors who are willing to appear on TV while being unable to offer any real information when so little is available... the passing's circumstances are so banal as to make one wonder what all the attendant fuss is about.
My experience of Ms. Richardson's work started with Paul Schrader's Patty Hearst, a film I see as greatly underrated, which also included breakthrough, career-tone-setting performances by Ving Rhames and Dana Delany. She was, in that work, profoundly vulnerable and sexy in a way that surprised me. Her stage work was discussed around the release of the film. But The Handmaid's Tale, directed by the The Tin Drum's Volker Schlöndorff as his first English-language film, and loaded with talent like Duvall and Dunaway (who we hadn't seen much of since Barfly), as well as Victoria Tennant, a similarly promising British blond who tended toward the icy as Richardson tended towards the broken, just didn't work. The The Comfort of Strangers, directed again by Schrader, and bursting at the seams with talent (Walken, Mirren, and Rupert Everett), from the McEwan book, adapted by Pinter, just didn't work.
And just like that, Ms. Richardson's career as a movie star was over. She had moments in the light again (Nell, The Parent Trap, Maid In Manhattan) and one shot at a real return - The White Countess - which would be Ismail Merchant's last film... and another film that held a lot of promise and could not deliver overall.
It was in the midst of this filmic wandering that she won The Tony for her light-singing, all-acting Sally Bowles in Sam Mendes revival of Cabaret.
There is no avoiding the sense that there may have been a great next act for this actress. She held that promise and that talent. And it would be a terrible shame if she was best remembered for this odd death.
They are doing the autopsy now, here in NY. I wish they weren't. Do we - does anyone - need to know enough to cut into the flesh of the dead? What an odd notion that these details need to be cleared up in any death other than one involving suspected foul play.
And so, grief for this loss. And a reminder of how fragile we all really are. And how tough.
She will be missed.
Read the complete post at http://www.mcnblogs.com/thehotblog/archives/2009/03/natasha_richard.html