Vanessa Redgrave: I still struggle to accept Natasha’s gone

Family: from left, Natasha Richardson, Vanessa Redgrave and Joely Richardson
Alistair Foster12 April 2012

Vanessa Redgrave has described how her youngest daughter Joely Richardson urged her to write to her late daughter Natasha to help her overcome her grief.

But Vanessa, 73, said she "can't bring herself to do it", and still struggles to accept the loss of Natasha, who died last March after a skiing accident.

She told Harper's Bazaar: "I used to be a big diary writer, but I haven't written for quite a while, and Joely, my second daughter, has been urging me to write again, to write to Natasha in my diary. And I said to her, I know you're right, but I can't bring myself to do it.
I literally cannot do it.'

"Although I knew she was right, I knew. But to write to my daughter and not be able to hear back, to leave a message for her not to ring me back, it's still a very, very hard thing."

Natasha, 45, suffered a fatal head injury when she fell while skiing at Mont Tremblant in Canada. Her husband Liam Neeson, 56, flew her to a New York hospital but she died three days later. Vanessa added: "[It] changed my world, because it isn't usual that the mother survives and the daughter dies, except in horrible situations like war or Gaza.

"I still find it very difficult, of course. I found it difficult when my mother died [in 2003], but I knew she had to. I was grief-stricken and missed her desperately, because she lived with me for the last few years of her life. But you accept that — even if you rebel spiritually because you can't bear your mother to have gone.

"Nevertheless, you know this has to happen, with old age. But when your daughter dies, it's so unacceptable, particularly when it's not expected in any shape or form. Actually it's pretty terrible if it is expected."

The full interview appears in Harper's Bazaar, on sale Thursday 4 February.

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