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The Long-Distance Runner: An Autobiography

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The lovely Natasha Richardson led me to this book. I turned fifty the day she died; March 18, 2009. I had become an admirer of her's years before, after seeing "Patty Hearst", which I'd seen because Vanessa Redgrave had been my favorite actor and I was curious as to whether her daughter could act. Hell yeah she could! From then on I followed her career and like her mother she never let me down. Anyway, I actually stumbled on this, her father's wonderful autobiography, while trying to find something to read about Natasha. Like many, I was shocked by her passing and so I started hunting for comfort on the internet. What a boon this book turned out to be. Natasha herself wrote the moving forward. One of my all time favorite films is "A Taste of Honey", and I had over the years seen most of Tony Richardson's other major film work ("Tom Jones","The Hotel New Hampshire","Look Back in Anger", "The Entertainer","The Loneliness of..."), so that I was aware he was a brilliant filmmaker of sound integrity, but I had little knowledge of the life that informed his films, or that he'd even written this book, which was published after his untimely death from AIDS in 1991. Therefore, "The Long Distance Runner" put Tony Richardson's films in context for me. From it's pages emerged a born director with a strongly humane, humorous, unflinchingly down to earth point of view, who became a major influence on the British theater scene in the fifties and early sixties which gave him the opportunity to direct films and thereby win an Oscar. Natasha it turns out didn't fall far from the tree in more ways than one. (Again and again she chose roles in interesting films and plays, full of peculiar, eccentric, one of a kind characters like those in her father's films and plays.) Particularly illuminating were Richardson's remembrances of the early Yorkshire upbringing that formed him, and of his exciting tenure at the helm of the Royal Court Theater which broke ground for a more realistic (less stagy and stodgy) postwar English theater . Later the book is a revealing look at independant versus studio filmmaking over the course of his career, which loses no relevance today. Throughout, Richardson is wittily straight forward yet modest as he writes candidly of the ins and outs of relationships with friends and ingenious colleagues (Olivier, Geilgud, Albert Finney, Richard Burton, Jack Nicholson, Peggy Ashcroft, Vivien Leigh, Mick Jagger...), falling for Vanessa, and the birth of his three daughters. Of interest also is his telling of his affair with Jeanne Moreau which ended his marriage to Redgrave (though they remained friends and repeatedly, collaborators). It all adds up to a story of a very full, well traveled life . A fascinating if understandably selective-(nothing about his fight with AIDS) account, of the man as well as the artist whose cinematic point of view (thanks to Turner Classic Movies) I've come to value greatly. See his films and read this book. After all ... may it comfort us to believe that the luminously beautiful Natasha Richardson is with her father now. For as evidenced by her touching forward to this book and her Tony acceptance speech of 1998, she loved him so. Rest in Peace Natasha and Tony. Thanks for enriching our lives. Like father, like daughter.