Natasha Richardson was her own unique life force. She possessed a high-wire vitality that took you in its arms, shook you, seduced you and cajoled you into living life without regrets. Friendship was an anchor for her. She thrived on bringing friends together. She created occasions full of affection and joy, moments of celebration that sometimes felt like a magical dance. She mixed lethal cocktails (she loved lychee martinis), cooked extraordinary food, was a spontaneously good nurse, laughed and delighted in stories and anecdotes, and had a mischievous ear for a good scandal. She loved to play music and would impatiently search her iPod for exactly the right track for the moment. And she loved to dance. And she loved to watch a movie with friends. And she loved the sun. And she loved her family.
A night out with Tash was a test of stamina and her endurance left most friends flagging before the last "hurrah". If you thought you were the early riser after a night of excess you would find her already awake in the kitchen reading the New York Post, making a mug of tea for Liam [Neeson] and mulling over a recipe, or planning the day ahead.
Natasha was an inspired "planner". She planned events, birthdays, holidays, a reunion of friends, a trip to the cinema. It was as if there was some ideal way time might be organised. She'd have a keen expectation of her plans falling into place and if fate or circumstance pulled the order of things another way, she'd sometimes feel it with acute disappointment. But she was thrillingly persistent, out-persisting the most determined people and you loved her for it, even while you felt dazed by the detail of the planning.
I first saw Natasha in the Rada bar. Although she was an acting student at Central School of Speech and Drama, she would come to support her sister Joely in student productions in Rada's Vanbrugh Theatre. I never spoke to her, but I remember the mix of beauty, charisma and something febrile, slightly anxious.
I didn't really get to know her until she appeared at Liam Neeson's side on the set of Schindler's List in Krakow, in March 1993. Liam and Natasha's intense attraction for each other shone out, and I remember a night in a student bar where Tash, looking radiant, sang "Maybe this Time", from the musical Cabaret, with a sensual elation that blew everyone away. She knew Sally Bowles was her part even before she played it.
Natasha was a superb actress who would risk exposing her deepest vulnerabilities in a role. This could be at a cost, as if in removing any defensive skin in the service of a part, she could be without defence in everyday life. Sometimes, unwittingly, one would trip over a fault-line in her self-confidence, causing an emotional bruise, or some upset that seemed out of proportion. I learned, I think, that this was the very rawness that made her so extraordinary in plays like The Seagull, The Lady from the Sea and A Streetcar Named Desire, and so moving in Cabaret. In Ibsen's play (The Lady from the Sea) in the role of Ellida, she found an astonishing lucid emotional simplicity. It appeared effortless, but I think it came from a deeper fragility within. But she also had wit and joy and style and all these qualities flowed together.
She was particularly happy at Le Nid du Duc, a house in the south of France where she had spent much of her childhood and youth. Every summer she and Liam would invite friends and family to stay there. A small cluster of farm cottages embedded on a steep hillside surrounded by trees and guarded by peacocks became a haven. It gave Tash huge pleasure to see her friends unwind, relax, be silly and enjoy lazy days that unfolded slowly and often hilariously in the Mediterranean heat.
If there's one image or memory that many of her friends would share, and miss so much – it would be arriving at Le Nid du Duc after fretful travel and delayed flights, driving to the end of a dusty rutted track to be greeted by the vision of a green lawn, a small building with windows painted in Provençal blue and Natasha striding towards you, arms outstretched, joy in her eyes as if she knew for a few days she'd take your heart and pour her own ecstatic sunlight into it.★