The actress Joely Richardson is sitting in a central London hotel suite in a black lacy top and black leather culottes (she can’t remember who designed them), a look of surprised sadness on her elegant features. She has just retrieved a long-buried memory from 2009 of the days after the news her older sister, Natasha, also an actress, was in hospital in New York after a freak skiing accident.
Richardson was in London filming the BBC drama The Day of the Triffids when she heard her sister had slipped and banged her head during a beginner’s lesson. “It was the weirdest thing,” she says softly and very slowly, but with the familiar, full-bodied timbre of her Redgrave ancestry (mother Vanessa, uncle Corin, aunt Lynn, grandfather
