Dynasty

Natasha Richardson is talking about her sons, Micheal and Daniel, three and two respectively, and her niece, Daisy - the daughter of her actress sister, Joely - who appeared, very briefly, in Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth as a saintly Catholic infant. When will you lot just give it a rest? I find myself asking. 'Well, I hope my sons don't want to act,' she says, stubbing out her cigarette rather violently. 'I really hope they don't. I'm not going to be encouraging it. I think it would be really tough for them. Really tough. I know what it's like, and to be the sons of a great actor, stepping into those footsteps... I hope they don't want to do it.' But she, of all people, should know that if Micheal and Daniel decide to follow their parents (their father is Liam Neeson, whom she married in 1994) into film and theatre, there's sod all she can do to stop them.

'There was never any pressure in my family put on me to act. Quite the opposite,' Natasha has already said, in that hesitant, throaty, absurdly familiar voice which, like a grandfather clock or a bit of jewellery, has been handed down from her mother. 'My sister was different. Joely went through phases of wanting to do different things, but for me it all came from inside; it's what I always wanted to do. My whole education was planned around it. I thought: "OK, I'll leave St Paul's when I'm 16 so that I can do my A-levels in a year so I can get to drama school when I'm 17, instead of 18 or 19." For me, it was tunnel vision.'

Nowadays, Natasha is so much part of the US entertainment landscape that it's easy to underestimate the determination it must have taken to get there and (maybe more importantly) stick it out. We may be fascinated by theatrical dynasties, but we don't always want them to flourish. Rather than her film roles in The Handmaid's Tale, Widow's Peak and Nell, or her triumphs on Broadway, she has, inevitably, always been defined by her relationships: with her parents, Vanessa Redgrave and Tony Richardson; with her grandparents, Sir Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson; with her uncle Corin, aunt Lynn and cousin Jemma Redgrave; and with her second husband, Liam Neeson, whom she met in 1993 when they acted together in a Broadway production of O'Neill's Anna Christie. This freight makes things difficult for both of us, not least because the questions that bore or irritate her, the ones about parents and husbands, aren't the ones you drag out specially for the offspring or wives of famous people: they are the questions that you'd put to anyone you were interested in. You ask them with a sinking heart. There is no way around them.

She says, quite tartly, that one reason why she chose to live in America (she moved there in the early 1990s) was because 'I have always felt, in this country, as if I'm trailing this... baggage of family. And I've never felt that there. It's nice when you feel appreciated for yourself.' On the other hand, there are various moments during our meeting when you sense that she is entirely deferential to Neeson's talent, keen to draw a line between them as professionals. As well as that touching, self-effacing mention of 'a great actor', she remarks that, though she is recognised in the street, 'I obviously don't have to deal with it on the level that really big stars have to deal with... Not like some other people I could mention.' Poor Natasha. At 35, she has everything: beauty, talent, children, recognition (her Sally Bowles in Cabaret on Broadway scooped the Tony, the Outer Critics' Circle and the Drama Desk awards for best actress) - but still she's loitering in the shadows that loom around her. Is it humility? Her famous lack of self-esteem? Or is it that, after a long apprenticeship, she feels more comfortable in the court of stars, rather than commanding her own?

It's interesting, working through the pile of press cuttings in the Natasha Richardson file, and then meeting her. There's barely a trace left of her earlier persona: the Paulina with the boho gypsy tops, the graphic eyebrows, the roots, the enormous tawny mane slung, posh-girl style, to one side like a rumpled bedspread. Nowadays, she is petite, buffed, coiffed, transatlantic: her accent irresolute, her eyebrows elegant calligraphy, her hair a sleek cap the colour of unsalted butter. That rather beguiling, rough-around-the-edges, English-rose beauty must have been lost in the move to the US, and has been replaced by something more cosmopolitan, more international, in tailored black trousers and an embroidered turquoise cashmere cardigan from Anna Sui.

There's something about our meeting, some connection, that bothers me, and then it occurs to me that Natasha, like the featureless hotel suite we meet in, while being entirely agreeable, is surrounded by a rather corporate, polished and neutral Ready Brek glow. You can't really blame her for this: right now, she is at war with the press. She and Neeson are suing 30 newspapers across the world for printing stories which inaccurately alleged their marriage was over. So far, they have picked up payments in the region of £130,000 from the Telegraph, and £50,000 from the Mirror and the Daily Record. All damages will be donated to the victims of the Omagh bombing. No one knows exactly where the story came from, but it is thought that it was as insubstantial as this: an unnamed source may have seen someone who resembled Natasha coming out of a divorce lawyer's office.

'The image thing, how people write about you or talk about you, that can be very, very frustrating,' she says at one point. 'Because it's so far from the truth.' Her minders have warned me off the subject, but since she has brought it up, it seems a good moment to ask how she heard the newspapers had run the story. She pauses and fixes her eyes on a spot on the carpet. 'That I am allowed to say... Our lawyer said I'm not allowed to talk about it but I guess I can answer that question. I was in Italy, with Liam, having a "lovely romantic time" [she pegs out the words between inverted commas], when I got panicked phone calls from my family and friends, and that's how I found out.'

What made them decide to take action?

'I have to think whether I'm allowed to answer that.' There is an embarrassingly long pause - maybe 15 seconds - and then she looks up and takes a breath, as if she has just popped to the surface. 'I think... when something's on that level, you can't ignore it. You just can't. It was too much, too big.'

There's a passage in Tony Richardson's memoirs (which Natasha found squirrelled away at the back of the cupboard in which he kept his Oscars, on the day of his death from an Aids-related illness in November 1991), where he describes falling in love with the young Vanessa Redgrave during her performance in As You Like It. 'This great golden flame,' he wrote, 'So light, so fluid, so involving.' They married in 1962 and divorced four years later, after he became involved with Jeanne Moreau on the set of Mademoiselle. 'The movie is your marriage,' he wrote, much later, 'and there's no place for wife or mistress outside.'

Two decades on, he recognised similar qualities in Natasha, then playing Nina in The Seagull in the West End, and noted that she has 'the same quality of being able to communicate emotion and let emotion flow through fully and directly that her mother has.' By all accounts, this is just about the only characteristic mother and daughter have in common. It all sounds fearfully Edina and Saffy but while Vanessa was dedicating herself to the Workers' Revolutionary Party and delivering political tirades to the Hollywood establishment when she should have been nicely thanking them for her Oscar, Natasha (who went, at her father's insistence, not to the local comp but to the French Lycée and St Paul's, before the Central School of Speech and Drama) was earning her cookery badge at Brownies and keeping house at 30 St Peter's Square, Hammersmith.

During school holidays, at Richardson's rambling Provencal estate, Le Nid du Duc, she was co-opted into the kitchen, and, according to legend, learned not to flinch when told there would be an extra 20 for lunch. Custom became a passion; not one which is necessarily compatible with her profession. Having raved about Nigel Slater's writing - 'I just drool over it. So sensual, so unpretentious, you know?' - she adds, quite sadly: 'It's a constant struggle for me. I do boring things that I didn't use to do, like working out a lot. Part of me loves food, loves to cook, and I could so easily go: "Oh, forget it, I'm just going to live at home and get fat."'

A short, plump, domestically-minded child, surrounded by unpredictable adults who dropped in on the way back from Cannes, California or China, she seems to have been the pivot of a fragmented family, stubbornly fashioning order out of chaos. Though she protests that she is now 'a little looser', that urge to assume responsibility is still deeply ingrained. (It's thought she is no longer quite as correct as she was during her first marriage, to the theatre producer Robert Fox. A friend of hers described the set-up as intimidating: 'The china just so, drinks at six, dinner at eight.') Rejecting the idea that she is a control freak, Natasha says she takes comfort from structure. 'There are two theories,' she explains. 'You can go on holiday and say: "Let's see what happens, let's have a wonderful time and maybe we'll discover this amazing little French inn that nobody's ever found, and have the best meal of our lives." And that might happen. But you might end up in a Comfort Inn on the motorway because everything's booked up. So my theory is, I'd rather read books, discover where that little inn is, and make sure I get the reservation beforehand.'

She describes coming off stage in Cabaret and sitting in her dressing room during the interval, compiling shopping lists for the following weekend. She is, you can tell, still haunted by Vanessa's casual, cavalier flamboyance. 'I remember my mother, when I was a child, was always terribly late for everything. And I'm pathologically early for things. I can't bear being late. It seems very rude.' The pair have since made peace, but Natasha was in any case always closer to her father, sharing his transatlantic impulses. Her first memory of America is of flying into Los Angeles on a visit: 'This amazing thing of swimming pools, turquoise pools, glittering in the sun below. It wasn't like going to the Chiswick Baths.' In some ways, she never left the US, and - though she has some reservations about raising children there - she has no plans to do so in the future. She and Liam live in Manhattan, and have a farmhouse in upstate New York; the boys have Irish and American passports.

The exotic muddle that was her childhood had other repercussions, too. 'I think that's why work's so important to me. That's what I've finally figured out. Mostly out of my own choice, and partly because of a sort of vacuum, I was a caretaker for other people. I loaded myself with responsibility, I grew up probably too soon and was, you know, very boring and middle-aged as a teenager. And maybe because of that, in my work,' Natasha pauses, sounding rather embarrassed, 'in my work I'm able to show the vulnerability that I don't feel I can show in life.' More than any actor I've met, she manages to articulate the appeal of performing. She talks about it as if it were a drug, or a seance, or a good hand in poker. 'The best moments are when you're on stage, or you have one take in a movie, and suddenly you feel - totally free. You don't know what's going to happen next, and yet you're in control. It's the best feeling in the world. And you always want to get it back. It doesn't happen very often, it comes only in flashes.'

In her next film, she flexes a new muscle: comic timing. The Parent Trap, a remake of the Hayley Mills classic, is good-natured family entertainment in which the sun always shines and sofa cushions are never dented. It is, in some ways, a surprise to see Richardson popping up here as the quintessential yummy mummy, but apparently the part (and the challenge of a 'drunk' scene - which, incidentally, she pulls off quite brilliantly) was the sort of opportunity that doesn't come along very often. 'I don't think people think of me in that way, they think I'm very, very serious.' When they were doing Cabaret, the director Sam Mendes told her: 'It's funny; the thing that most people would find hard, which is to go for the very dark, painful places, is where you're most comfortable. And you're really uncomfortable doing the confident, light, bright and funny stuff.' She says he's right. 'I'd love to do more comedy. I think it's really hard.'

But for the time being, she's going back to ploughing the usual furrow: sex, madness, tragedy. Next up, she and Liam will be playing the leads in a film version of Asylum, Patrick McGrath's novel about the doomed relationship between the wife of the deputy superintendent at a hospital for the criminally insane and an inmate. Patrick Marber is writing the screenplay, and it's clear that Natasha has hopes that this will be the film role for which she is remembered, even though she much prefers working in the theatre. 'Henry Fonda said, "Movie acting is learning how to wait," and there are some days when you sit in the trailer all day and wait for your big moment, which is opening a car door, and think: "Is this what I'm doing with my life?"' But the satisfaction of a triumph captured on celluloid would make it all worthwhile: she adds that it's odd, having invested so much in Cabaret, to find it vanish into thin air at the end of the run.

I'm suddenly persuaded of how galling interviews must be for Natasha when I hear myself asking whether the acclaim she received for her Sally Bowles has finally helped, in her own mind, to banish those family ghosts. 'Well, in my mind,' she says, laughing rather stiffly, as she does when irritated, 'I'd escaped before that, certainly in terms of America. But then, who knows?

A really good friend of mine called me up when the New York Times review came out, and said: "It's so fantastic, you've had such a triumph, you're really going to be taken for yourself now, in your own right." And I was like: "Oh! I thought I already was. But thank you! All right, I'll take it!"'