On screen or off, Joely Richardson cannot fail to make an entrance. She swishes into The Ladbroke Arms in Notting Hill, a jolt to all the mid-afternoon WFH punters: willowy, straight blonde hair and wearing a cream cashmere cable-knit with a silky shirt, grey coat, black trousers and subtly twinkly gold jewellery, like an ‘old money’ Instagram reel; her unchanging elegant self, so reminiscent of her mother in her younger days. The daughter of the actress Vanessa Redgrave and the late director Tony Richardson, she has a luminous, dynastic quality; a natural presence. The Redgrave gene has been the omnipresent pivot of British acting for decades – Joely is the granddaughter of Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson, niece of Corin and Lynn, sister of Natasha – which is not to say there is anything haughty or formal about her. On the contrary, she is easy to laugh, thoughtful, self-effacing yet direct – no wonder her thespian career is having a rollicking resurgence which sees her, at 59, adding lustre to the drama series of several streamers all at once.
The wooden pews around a pub table seem a fitting place to meet because she is here to talk about Renegade Nell, a feisty and fast eight-part series written by Happy Valley and Gentleman Jack writer Sally Wainwright for Disney+. Set in the early 18th century, much of it in ye olde jolly beer-frothing taverns of candlelit England, complete with mouthy barmaids and drawling toffs, it is adventure-meets-fantasy. Being a Wainwright production, it is also a strong-woman tale: Nell Jackson, played with zing by Louisa Harland, returns from fighting – dressed as a man – in the Battle of Blenheim, only to find herself framed for murder and, with the aid of a magical spirit called Billy Blind (winningly played by Nick Mohammed), becomes a notorious highwaywoman who may or may not be able to save Queen Anne from an evil plot.
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There are traces of The Favourite and Game of Thrones, a dash of the magic of Harry Potter, wit and feminism all thrown into the tankard. Joely’s character is the magnificent Lady Eularia Moggerhanger, a newspaper magnate and the ‘intended’ of a feckless highwayman/aristocrat played by Frank Dillane. Joely – who has now been acting for 40 years, she tells me with an exclamation mark – once played one third of a love triangle with Frank’s father, Stephen (and Gary Oldman – it was a David Hare production). ‘Frank is brilliant, like his father, improvisational, very free, which I love,’ she says. It feels very 2024 that a woman should have played love interest to father and son. Indeed, Joely’s career has had more plot twists than any Disney+ series and has turned out to be just as surprising.
Striding into prison to greet her lover, clad in clashing colours and an attitude, Joely’s Lady Moggerhanger lands in a hat the size of a crater, with a small yapping dog, a towering wig, a camp sidekick and waspish lines. It looks enormous fun; but it was shot in a summer heatwave somewhere east of Victoria Park. ‘I loved my character and it was an honour, a privilege, to wear designer Tom Pye’s costumes,’ she says. ‘At times it was an endurance test: two hours to put it on, the weight and heat, 14 hours in a corset. You have to breathe deep and eat some glucose.’ She was also filming two other TV series, both for Netflix, at the same time – Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen (starring Theo James of The White Lotus fame) and an adaptation of David Nicholls’ hit novel One Day. Of which more later. And just before Renegade Nell, she had played Lady Moggerhanger’s opposite in Lady Chatterley’s Lover – Mrs Bolton, the nurse to Sir Clifford Chatterley. (Emma Corrin was Lady Chatterley, a part Joely herself played in her youth opposite Sean Bean.)
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She is full of praise for her Renegade Nell co-star Harland, who made her name in Channel 4’s Derry Girls: ‘I knew instantly with Louisa that she’s the real deal. The dialogue on the page is quite tricky stuff, very quippy. Obviously the scripts are brilliant, but it’s not as easy as it looks. You wouldn’t know it because everyone has such a light touch, but that stuff can go very wrong because you’ve got to get the exact twist and wit. She was funny and charming and it all trickles down from the top. She absolutely carries Renegade Nell.’ After four decades of acting – she started working professionally at 19 – and with all that world in her genes, Joely can recognise the ‘real deal’ because ‘it’s just something you notice, like builders who have been doing things for a long time’. (You could say it’s even longer than that, since her father cast her aged just two in The Charge of the Light Brigade, although she can’t remember it. The enduring story is that ‘Tash was dressed very prettily as a girl, and I was dressed as a boy’.)
Joely sees her career in chapters – places, agents, life events. There were agents who retired, and then the Los Angeles years, ‘although I never moved there, I just worked and came home’. That was Nip/Tuck, Ryan Murphy’s gregarious six-season hit series set in a plastic surgery clinic, in which she played the wife of a plastic surgeon.
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After that came the terrible shock of the death of her beloved older sister Tash, with whom she had grown up moving around with their mother, attending the French Lycée and St Paul’s Girls’ School in London, although Joely then went to a tennis academy in Florida and boarded in Ojai. Natasha Richardson, also an actress, died in March 2009 aged just 45 after hitting her head in a fall on a ski slope in Canada. For Joely, there followed the New York years, where she chose theatre over television, partly to be close to her nephews, Natasha’s sons with her husband, Liam Neeson, who were only 12 and 13 when their mother died. (The oldest, Micheál Richardson, is now an actor himself.) ‘It wasn’t a wise choice career-wise to go from mainstream television to doing sort of off-off-Broadway theatre, but that was the stuff I most wanted to do then.’
She had a run of funerals around that time, and ‘I didn’t know that’s what I was doing… it’s called “soldier mode”, where you carry on but something’s not right. I was permanently on alert and I worked off cortisol energy for a long time anyway, even before that. It’s not good. It has no shelf life and it’s an exhausting way to live.’
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So, after a few years, she decided to regroup in England. ‘After 30 years, I just thought, “Oh God, I don’t want to be going into work and crying my eyes out and, you know, doing high drama. I’m quite happy to park all that for a bit.” But breaking into the English market was… it’s ironic because a lot of the companies are American, but it was very difficult,’ she laughs. ‘I did lots of much smaller roles to keep working, because I didn’t want to be away from home and loved ones for months on end any more.’
It seems unbelievable now that initially she found it hard to get a new agent in London (‘It’s never the story people think it is!’), but she connected with Sue Latimer immediately and underwent ‘something of a reinvention’. ‘I started to just get a little foot in the door, like Suspect, with Jimmy Nesbitt, and then Mrs Bolton, which was random. But I had a wonderful time, and things started to get easier. So it’s weird that sometimes the back step is actually the thing that [made] casting directors want to hire me again.’
With One Day and The Gentlemen, she has been doing ‘a run of posh mums’, she laughs. Shooting The Gentlemen (in which she plays the bereaved duchess) at Badminton and other grand estates, ‘every day felt like a new location’. Guy Ritchie was ‘great and he’s “out there”. He wouldn’t mind me saying that. He’d probably love it,’ she says. Much laughter. ‘I’ve never worked with anyone like him. Someone like David Fincher [who directed her in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo] does loads of takes. But Guy? I think he likes to throw people. He rewrites at the last minute. Big rewrites. But once you get over the “what the hell am I going to do?”, it’s an adventure. He was really sweet; he’s not a mean director, not someone who screams and shouts. It’s very family, the way he works.’
For Joely, it’s all about trust in the director, and with The Gentlemen and Renegade Nell, ‘I was lucky because both were fabulous characters, they had enough eccentricity that it wasn’t in the spaces’. She explains: ‘You know how they say a lot of acting is in the silences? Sometimes it isn’t; it’s all about the dialogue.’
Joely has been on the cover of Tatler twice before; in 1991, as a young actress modelling the designs of Catherine Walker, and in 2010 (when I was editor), on set in Ireland for The Tudors, dressed in Dior. Each of her three covers mirrors each stage of her career. The first was ‘a big deal for me – I think it was my first ever cover’. Walker was a friend and Joely admired her ‘steely, precise work ethic, coupled with her grace and fragility as a woman. She had a fierce loyalty. When Princess Diana died, I think she was utterly heartbroken. Catherine had just made a suit for her and passed it on to me as we were a similar height and size.’
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When Joely was nominated for the second time at the Golden Globes, Catherine recreated Grace Kelly’s iconic To Catch a Thief dress, also worn by Diana. Joely sends me a wonderful photograph, taken by her agent, of her in the dress, drinking a quick espresso in the Chateau Marmont before setting off for the ceremony. She still has the blue satin shoes that were made to go with it. At the costume fitting for One Day there were mood boards of ’90s women: Joely had been used as a reference before she had even been cast. ‘The Catherine Walker piece so reminded me of those times,’ she says.
The 2010 Tatler cover shoot wasn’t long after Tash’s death: ‘There were a couple of years before I descended from the shock,’ Joely says. What strikes her now is how much has changed since then. ‘They say the Earth was made round so you couldn’t see too far ahead,’ she reflects. And after that event, ‘I changed and moved away from a lot of nonsense and got involved with things that mattered to me: the charities I work with [Save the Children; The Children’s Trust]. I travelled to Uganda, Ethiopia, hospitals, schools, refugee camps. I became much more family-oriented and had more responsibilities.’
Joely had her daughter, Daisy, 31, with her now ex-husband Tim Bevan, one half of that colossus of British film production Working Title. Daisy lives in London but Joely says she is ‘the one thing that I just don’t want to talk about. So all I will say is that she’s the most fabulous, wise and inspirational person that I know.’ She has always been equally discreet about her love life – although from 2008 to 2011, her relationship with the Evening Standard’s Russian proprietor, Evgeny Lebedev – created Baron Lebedev of Hampton and Siberia by Boris Johnson in 2020 – was much covered. ‘I never talk about my love life, which over the years might have given the impression of not having one. I’ve had a colourful and adventurous time, but have not yet been able to sign on the dotted line since my first marriage. I’ve been asked, but it just never felt right. I was seeing someone for the last few years but we split last summer.’
Now she lives in a flat near Paddington – much renovated during the actors’ strike – and a house in the country. In both places, she is a walker: ‘I am most relaxed on a long dog walk in the countryside or getting lost in my garden,’ she says. But she also pounds the city streets in New York or in Farringdon: ‘I just love being part of the general movement of the day.’ Not like her mother, then, who has always been political, but just ‘part of the flow’. Joely also loves markets, galleries, people, their stories, catching up with friends and pulling off a ‘great cook-up for a crowd’. ‘I would call myself a medium cook, not top level. I was lucky there was an Italian side of my family growing up,’ she says. (She has a half-brother, Carlo Nero, by Vanessa’s second husband, director Franco; as well as a half-sister, Katherine Grimond, Tony Richardson’s daughter with Grizelda Grimond.) She also still loves tennis and has joined a club. ‘[It’s] more fun than the gym. On set you have to maintain the same weight over a six-month period and I absolutely can’t eat anything I want now.’
She has followed her mother, and indeed her father (who won an Oscar for Tom Jones, and also directed The Entertainer and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner), in following the work. Her father had an atmospheric hamlet in the South of France, Le Nid de Duc (where Hockney painted and Hollywood stayed), and he wanted his children to be bilingual, hence their attending the Lycée in Kensington. There’s an elusive quality that some people have, she notes, a wanderlust, a strange drive, or an inability to sit still: ‘I have it. I will do strange things like go swimming in a freezing sea in January.’ Her mother’s drive fuelled her politics; her father was a great traveller and had ‘the desire to pursue the arts as much as he could, [which] obviously my mother has, too. Neither of them were ever about fame or wealth. It was always about the work; I do have that.’
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She calls them two brilliant individuals. When her Yorkshire-born, bisexual father died of Aids-related complications in 1991, she lost the person she would always ask for advice. ‘I would say, “Should I do this job?” He would say, “Work breeds work, so just do it.” But he was tricky. And naughty – he encouraged quite wild behaviour, and he was quite a hard taskmaster for me and Tash when we went into the profession.’ As for her mother: ‘We love each other enormously and spend an awful lot of time together. We talk about everything and also drive each other mad in the way that mothers and daughters do.’
At the moment, Joely is shooting season two of Surface, the Apple TV+ thriller. ‘I think it’s funny that I perhaps have got to a stage where playing characters is more interesting to me… Maybe I was always a character actor that didn’t know it,’ she says. As Lady Eularia Moggerhanger makes her debut in Renegade Nell, Joely is delighted with her new phase. ‘There’s a gravestone near my grandma’s that says “grit and grace” and I resonate with that, but honestly, mine would just say “thank you”. I feel very lucky in my life. I’ve had big heartbreaks, like most people, but I have big love in my life – I feel loved and I love back.’ Long may Queen Joely reign.
This article was first published in the April 2024 issue. Renegade Nell will be available on Disney+ from 29 March
