Backstage at the Broadhurst theatre in New York during the summer, Liam Neeson was in his dressing room, relaxing over a glass of wine and winding down after another night of catching the extreme highs and lows of Oscar Wilde's life in David Hare's play, The Judas Kiss. Four blocks away, at the disused warehouse transformed into the decadent Weimar Republic nightclub, the Kit Kat Club, for the hit Broadway revival of Cabaret, Natasha Richardson was changing out of her Sally Bowles costume.
"Excuse me for a minute," Neeson says as he picks up the phone in his dressing room to call his wife at her dressing room. Calling her by his pet name for her - Tash - he arranges to meet her for dinner before they head home for the night.
Returning to his glass of wine, he speaks with great affection about her, and with great pride for her achievement in winning a Tony award in June for her acclaimed performance as Sally Bowles in Cabaret. And he explains how, to maximise the free time they get to spend together and with their two young sons, they have planned for their theatrical commitments in the two shows to end on the same day. Despite the urgings of impresarios and the evident public demand, she has arranged to make her exit from Cabaret (to be replaced by Jennifer Jason Leigh) on the day The Judas Kiss comes to the end of its scheduled Broadway run.
So it seemed all the more incredible when, two months later, some British and Irish newspapers started running stories claiming that the marriage of Neeson and Richardson was over. As it happened, there wasn't a scintilla of truth to those claims, as those newspapers were forced to admit in prominent retractions and apologies.
Richardson sighed at the memory of it all when we met in London recently. "It was appalling," she says, "not just for Liam and me, but also for our families and friends, who read about it before we even knew about it. I'm afraid I can't say anything more about it for now, on my lawyer's advice, because we're still in litigation over it."
She was in London to promote her latest movie, The Parent Trap, the story of twin sisters who are parted before they are a year old, when their parents' whirlwind romance runs out of steam. It's a remake of the 1961 Disney comedy in which Maureen O'Hara and Brian Keith played the parents and a young Hayley Mills played both sisters.
In the entertaining new version, Dennis Quaid and Richardson co-star as the divorced parents, and Lindsay Lohan takes the dual role of the twins who first discover each other's existence when they meet at summer camp; switching identities, they scheme to bring their parents back together. The screenplay is by the husband-and-wife team of Charles Shyer, who produced the film, and Nancy Meyers, who directed it.
Meyers told Richardson that she wanted the movie to be in the spirit of the great Carole Lombard comedies. "She offered to show some of the best Carole Lombard films to me on video, but I love all those movies and I had seen all of them already," says Richardson. However, she had not seen the original version of The Parent Trap. "I think it meant more in America than in Europe," she says, "and it was made before I was born. But when I saw it, I thought Maureen O'Hara was wonderful in it, so fiesty."
The key characters in the new version live pampered lives in a world of wraparound opulence, the way people did in the glossy Doris Day comedies of the 1960s. "I know," says Richardson. "They really do live on these incredible levels. I know no woman of my age who has a house like my character in the film, and a butler, and who gets to dine on this silver tea service."
Her funniest scene in the movie is an extended one in which she gets drunk on a transatlantic flight. "That was so difficult to do because, obviously, you can't be drunk when you're shooting it," she says. "And so many people have played drunk so unconvincingly on screen. I just went for it. But it was tough. Nancy was very demanding. There were quite a few scenes where she had me do 40 takes of a single scene, which is a lot."
Did Natasha Richardson find any resonances in the movie's central story-line, given that her own parents, Vanessa Redgrave and director Tony Richardson, broke up when she was a young girl? "Yes, there were resonances," she says. "You know, when I was a child I believed that if I saved up my pocket money and sent roses around to my mother, pretending they were from my father, that they might get back together again. But then, when you're a child, there are so many things you don't understand about your parents."
She tells an amusing story about three-year-old Micheal, the older of her two sons: "One day I took him to the Disney Store in New York and while we were looking around, a trailer for The Parent Trap came up on the TV screens in the store. Now Micheal is used to seeing Liam and me on the screen, so it's something he kind of takes for granted. `There's momma,' he says. But then Dennis Quaid appeared on the screen and started hugging me. `Who's that man?' Micheal says. `I don't like that man hugging momma.' And when we got home, he told Liam all about it."
Micheal and his one-year-old brother, Daniel, are growing up in one of the acting profession's most celebrated dynasties - a line that began with the marriage of the celebrated actors, Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson and continued with their three actor offspring - Vanessa, Lynn and Corin Redgrave - and with the daughters of Vanessa and Tony Richardson, Natasha and her younger sister, Joely Richardson, an actress in her own right.
Natasha was born in London on May 11th, 1963. She trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama and made her professional debut at Leeds Playhouse before returning to London and roles in A Midsummer Night's Dream (as Helena) and Hamlet (as Ophelia). In 1986 she received the London Drama Critics' Award for most promising newcomer for her performance in The Seagull and she co-starred with her mother, Vanessa, and her aunt, Lynn, in another Chekhov play, Three Sisters. Her film career, which began in 1986 with Ken Russell's Gothic, notably has included two films each for Pat O'Connor (A Month in the Country and Zelda, as Zelda Fitzgerald) and Paul Schrader (Patty Hearst and The Comfort of Strangers). "I just love working with Pat," she says. Would she like to have been in his film of Dancing at Lughnasa? "I wasn't asked," she says, feigning a sulk. "But I'm so looking forward to seeing it. I love the play, It's remarkable."
Her roles have also included Richard Eyre's BBC television film of Suddenly Last Summer; Volker Schlondorff's The Hand- maid's Tale, based on the Margaret Atwood novel; John Irvin's film of the Hugh Leonard screenplay, Widow's Peak; and Michael Apted's Nell, with Jodie Foster and Liam Neeson. She and Neeson first worked together in the Broadway revival of Anna Christie in 1993.
"Certainly, there's been a great variety in what I've done," she reflects, "and I've enjoyed it. But apart from Patty Hearst there hasn't been anything in film that has stretched me in the way that playing Anna Christie or Sally Bowles did. I don't want to go on about this, because every actress does, but there are not all that many really good roles out there for women, and when something really strong comes along, there's so much competition. But one keeps hoping."
In preparing to play Sally Bowles, she says she went back to the source: Christopher Isherwood's Berlin stories. "I developed my portrayal of Sally from there - and I added elements based on some people I know," she says. "It was very tough to start with, very demanding. And I don't sing anything like as well as Liza Minnelli, of course. Yes, I did sing in High Society in London, but I only had one-and-a-half-songs. But this was very different.
"Then I thought about it. I felt that if Sally sang as well as Liza does, she really wouldn't be performing in those seedy little clubs. She would be a big star. And that helped me deal with it. When I settled into it, it just got better and better."
Her eyes light up when she recalls "nights when it hit such heights that, if it had been a film, you would just go, `print that'. That's as good as you can get. Some audiences just lift you like that and encourage you to greater heights. Then, and this is the thing about theatre, there are other nights and you just don't feel that kind of surge from the audience and it doesn't feel as good. "I've been asked to do Cabaret in London next year, but I don't know about that. I feel I've done it now. There are quite a few other stage roles I would love to do. When I'm a little older, when I'm the right age, I would love to do Streetcar and play Blanche. I hear Frances McDormand, who's a friend of mine, did such a good job of it in Dublin. And I'd love to do Ibsen, perhaps The Lady From the Sea."
Meanwhile, Natasha Richardson and Liam Neeson are nurturing a new project for themselves: Patrick McGrath's novel, Asylum. "The book was sent to me by my friend, Harry Evans, at Random House," she says. "He thought I'd enjoy reading it. I was 20 pages into it and I was really hooked. I phoned Liam and said, `This is so good, it's one we have to do as a film'.
"So we started making calls the next day. That night we were out having dinner with friends and this man we didn't know came over to our table. I thought he was just someone looking for Liam's autograph. Then he said, `There's been a lot of phone activity today'. It was Patrick McGrath."
She puts that down to fate. She hopes that the film, which is set in 1950s England, will go into production next year.
Maybe they will shoot it in Ireland? "Now that is an interesting idea," she smiles. "And we really want Micheal and Daniel to spend more time in Ireland."