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Vanessa Redgrave began her illustrious screen career in 1958 with Brian Desmond Hurst's Behind the Mask, alongside her father, Sir Michael Redgrave. She won her first international notices for her role in Michelangelo Antonioni's landmark Blowup (1966). The same year, she played Anne Boleyn in A Man for All Seasons and was nominated for her first Best Actress Oscar for her work in Morgan! Redgrave was again Oscar-nominated for her performance as famed dancer Isadora Duncan in 1968's Isadora and for her work in Mary, Queen of Scots. In 1978 she won an Academy Award for her performance in the title role of Julia. The tall, graceful actress trained at London's Central School of Speech and Drama and subsequently joined the Stratford-upon-Avon Theatre Company, where she worked with many of the finest actors in Britain, including her future husband, Tony Richardson. Redgrave charmed audiences as Guinevere in the 1967 film version of Camelot (alongside Richard Harris), but since then has become known for her choice of often difficult and sometimes controversial roles as strong, independent women characters.

Redgrave made memorable appearances in Agatha (as mystery writer Agatha Christie), Merchant-Ivory's The Bostonians (for which she was Oscar-nominated), Prick Up Your Ears (as playwright Joe Orton's agent), and in the Merchant-Ivory masterpiece Howard's End (for which she received an Oscar nomination for her heartbreaking performance as the owner of the estate named in the title). She has done some of her best work in high-profile television films such as Playing for Time (Emmy Award, 1980), Second Serve (1986), in which she played transsexual tennis star Renee Richards, Charlton Heston's remake of A Man for All Seasons (1988) and a remake of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1991) that paired her, for the first time, with her sister Lynn.

Redgrave's kudos include an Emmy Award for HBO's If These Walls Could Talk 2 (2000) and an Emmy nomination for The Gathering Storm (2002). Recent feature films include roles in Mrs. Dalloway, Tim Robbin's politically charged Cradle Will Rock, the critically acclaimed Girl, Interrupted, and Sean Penn's The Pledge. For her work in Miramax Films' A Month By the Lake (1995), Roger Ebert declared her to be "at the absolute peak of physical and mental perfection."

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