her father being thrown over the parapet at the play's climax. The next play she saw was when her father appeared as Macbeth . "I fidgeted a lot," she says. That may have been the last time she failed to regard acting with anything but the utmost seriousness. Since giving up her early desire to be a dancer -- she trained with the Ballet Rambert as a teenager but became too tall to make it as a professional -- she has given herself entirely to almost every role she has taken. Redgrave has been nominated for six Oscars, and credited in more than 100 films, and although these appearances may be brief -- as the enigmatic woman at the centre of Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up , or the age-ravaged Briony at the end of Atonement -- they're frequently powerful enough to tilt an entire movie on its axis. Nevertheless, it's been suggested that Redgrave tried to discourage her daughters from becoming actors. "Be anything but that," Joely Richardson is reported to have quoted her mother as saying. Redgrave says she never did any such thing: So she didn't discourage them? "I have absolutely no memory of that whatsoever. Actually I meant to check this out with Joely because we're both always, or frequently, texting each other, saying, 'Listen, it says in such and such that I said this. I didn't. What I actually said was this. I'm so sorry'." She's been misquoted? "She to me or me to her. We