Joely Richardson: 'I celebrate ageing – my sister didn't get to do it' (2024)

“Oh, it’s so beautiful to watch Emma Corrin and Jack O’Connell run naked through the rain, isn’t it?” says Joely Richardson. In Netflix’s new adaptation of DH Lawrence’s 1928 novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, “they’re like children when they dash into the weather… so gloriously unselfconscious!”

No such luck for Richardson when she starred, opposite Sean Bean, as the heroine of Ken Russell’s 1993 version. “Sean and I arrived on set thinking, ‘Ah. it’s THIS day. We’re going to have to do this crazy thing.’” She winces. “The huge rain machines had been set up. Ken would have been blasting out some classical music, bombastic, operatic, probably Wagner. We got a quick ‘Ready, Steady, GO!’ And it was: robes off, run. There was an element of huge adrenalin and fun. But we were in a walled estate and just as we were shooting, a double decker bus came past the wall and the people on the top deck all stared down at us…” She dissolves into a fit of the giggles. “We were just: ‘OH! Oh! Oh. My. God.’”

Now 57, best known to younger viewers for her roles in Nip/Tuck and 101 Dalmatians, Richardson has returned to the “strange but familiar” world of Lawrence’s taboo-busting tale to play the nurse, Mrs Bolton, for the Netflix version directed by Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre. The female director has given an empowered slant to the story of a war-wounded aristocrat’s wife and her affair with the reclusive gamekeeper, Mellors. While Russell directed Richardson to play Lady Chatterley as a more coy character – with tumbling, tonged blonde curls and frosted eyeshadow on lowered lids – Corrin (who aced coy as Princess Diana in The Crown) plays her bold and fresh-faced, with more direct agency.

Lawrence himself was painfully conflicted about women’s sexuality. He was one of the first male writers to consider women’s sexual needs at all (surely part of the reason his book was banned until 1960) and he argued for woman as fully realised human beings when his peers dismissed them as merely ornamental. Yet he was also sneeringly contemptuous when those needs weren’t entirely met by a penis. In the novel, he gives Mellors a speech in which he rails against women who love “every kind of feeling and cuddling and going off, every kind except the natural one”, those who “bring themselves off, like my wife. They want to be the active party… Then there’s the sort that puts you out before you really ‘come’, and go on writhing their loins till they bring themselves off against your thighs. But they’re mostly the Lesbian sort.”

Joely Richardson: 'I celebrate ageing – my sister didn't get to do it' (1)

Clermont-Tonnerre crisply counters these awful, outdated views by giving 2022’s Lady Chatterley an emboldening masturbation scene. She also reimagines the relationship between Lady C and her husband’s nurse, converting a rivalry for Lord Chatterley’s limited affection into a supportive female friendship. So Richardson’s maternal Mrs Bolton assures Corrin’s heroine of the importance of love and physicalintimacy. It’s a role perfectly suited to Richardson, who has often played characters with a girlish warmth bubbling beneath a more poised and formal exterior.

“The solidarity between the women was a big part of what drew me to the role,” Richardson tells me, via video, from the cosy cream sofa of her London home. “That has been my own experience – I’ve always seen women very much on the side of other women. I loved Mrs Bolton. She’s a bit of a gossip, but a force for good. An old romantic at heart.”

Mocked at the time as a “silly” conclusion to a groundbreaking piece of television, Ken Russell’s 1993 version ended with Richardson and Bean sailing away together on a boat, embracing above the waves like a proto Kate and Leo.

Joely Richardson: 'I celebrate ageing – my sister didn't get to do it' (2)

Looking back, Richardson remembers Russell (who died in 2011) as “chaotic and crazy but also fabulous. Passionate and combative. He’s cinema history.”

She reminds me that, by the time she came to shoot Chatterley, she was well schooled in the way of the eccentric male auteurs, having worked with David Hare on 1985’s Wetherby and Peter Greenaway on 1988’s Drowning by Numbers. She would go on to work with Stephen Poliakoff, “then the Americans like David Fincher”, she adds. “Some of those great directors aren’t easy characters. But my dad [Tony Richardson] was a director and he always told me to follow the director’s vision.”

Last week, she finished filming Guy Ritchie’s The Gentleman and this week she started work on Disney’s The Ballad of Renegade Nell, “and you never know what you’re going to get from each director. Sometimes that is scary, but I would always try to follow their vision unless I felt so, so strongly about something. Because actors can be wrong too, y’know? Only the director and the editor have the whole vision. Giving up your ability to be right is really important. Because it’s not really about you. You have to adapt your style, adapt your comfort zones.”

One of the times Richardson admits to being out of her comfort zone was filming her ’93 Chatterley.

“Those were not the days of the gym-buffed bodies,” she recalls. “Ken later told me he had cast me because of my ‘old fashioned’ look. He didn’t want the modern female form. He didn’t want the sanitised version. So he didn’t get it!” She laughs, then winces. “But I do remember one scene…”

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She won’t say which scene it was, “because I don’t want people looking it up on YouTube, but I had to do something I did find embarrassing and vulnerable-making. Ken promised me the lighting would be very dappled and flickery, with partial shade. You remember the famous scene in his Women in Love where the men are fighting in front of the fire, stark bollock naked? Cinema legend, right? So I had imagined the lighting would be like that.

“But when I walked into the room there was this bright, flat lighting. I was, ‘Oh my God, this is NOT gonna look nice.’ I remember saying something to Ken and he said ‘Trust me, it will be graded, it will look different when it’s been edited.’ Well, when I saw it, there was no dappled shade, no flickering. It was quite harsh.”

Although the experience was uncomfortable, Richardson credits it with teaching her to put her own ego to one side and focus on storytelling. “I’m more and more confident about that with age,” she says. “I did a film with Nick Cage” – 2019’s Color Our of Space – “and the DP said to me, ‘This isweird, you seem to have no vanity about this.’ I remember on that Robert Altman film, Pret a Porter, some of the actors had complained about the lighting and he told them, ‘You look the way you look.’ That’s right. That’s how I want it.”

I wonder if the challenge of on screen nudity was less frightening for a woman who comes from such a celebrated acting dynasty as the Redgraves. Her grandfather was Michael Redgrave and her mother is Vanessa Redgrave – who famously starred as a sexually obsessed nun in Russell’s The Devils (1971) – and her older sister is Natasha Richardson, who died after a skiing accident in 2009 at the age of 45. Were they the kind of bohemian family who discussed artistic merits of on-screen nudity around the dinner table?

Richardson looks appalled. “No! No. I mean, was I brought up in a creative environment? Yes. But the downside of that was that I never saw my parents. This creative world people imagine I grew up in didn’t exist. My life was queuing up at the bus stop with my sister. Coming home from school, doing the shopping, cooking dinner and going to bed. My parents were divorced, so occasionally on holidays I’d get these glimpses of this other world because he was always on set.”

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Richardson’s co-star Sean Bean, has been a vocal sceptic of the modern embrace of intimacy coordinators on sets, arguing they kill spontaneity. Richardson admits that she hasn’t worked with one yet. “I know Emma Corrin was very happy to use one on Lady Chatterley, so I’m open to learning more about how they work. I was very lucky to be doing my own Chatterley scenes with an actor as wonderful as Sean Bean. He has a great sense of humour, which really helped get us through the whole thing. If you can’t laugh at times like that, then when can you?!”

Then she gets serious. “I do think we should remember that the really awful things that have happened in this industry haven’t happened on sets, with 50 people watching. They’ve happened off set, in secret. That’s what we have to look out for.”

Although much of the conversation around Chatterley is – inevitably – about sex, Richardson argues that “it’s really more about intimacy. After his war injury, Lord Chatterley is unable to offer his wife intimacy. So she finds it with Mellors. Although it’s an important part of Lawrence’s story, you don’t usually need full-frontal nudity to express intimacy. You can do it with the stroke of an arm, a gaze. I think we all crave intimacy these days. We’ve all got cut off, because of the screens, because of the state of everything. It’s been a terrifying time, hasn’t it?”

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She says that she’s able to embrace ageing while she is “still fully functional. Old age isn’t for sissies and I’ve seen it takes every inch of your stamina. But for now, I celebrate the process. I lived all those youthful years and I lived them well and I believe the beauty lies in the whole arc if you’re lucky enough to live it. There are people who haven’t made it to my age – my sister didn’t – so I’m not going to diss it.”

She takes a pause. “My maxim is a line from The Inheritors [Matthew Lopez’s 1910 play]: ‘Do what they could not: live.’ I think I’ve occasionally been quoted as saying ‘What I do is for my sister.’ But that would be insane. We have to do what we can with our own lives. In my work and in my life, I don’t ever turn up and dial it in.”

Lady Chatterley’s Lover is out on Netflix now

Joely Richardson: 'I celebrate ageing – my sister didn't get to do it' (2024)
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