Corin William Redgrave died he was 70

Corin William Redgrave died he was 70. Redgrave was an English actor and political activist.

(16 July 1939 – 6 April 2010)

Redgrave was born in Marylebone, London, the son of actors Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson.

Redgrave was educated at the independent Westminster School and at King's College at the University of Cambridge.

Redgrave played a wide range of character roles on film, television and stage.

He won the Olivier Award for his performance as Boss Whalen in Tennessee Williams' Not About Nightingales. He later repeated the role on Broadway, where he earned a Tony Award nomination. He appeared in Shakespearean plays such as Much Ado About Nothing, Henry IV, Part 1, and The Tempest. He also gained critical and popular approval in the works of Noël Coward, notably a highly successful revival of A Song At Twilight co-starring his sister Vanessa Redgrave and his second wife Kika Markham.

On screen he is best known for his roles in such acclaimed and diverse films as A Man for All Seasons, Excalibur, and Four Weddings and a Funeral.

He wrote a play Bluntly Speaking, which has been produced at the Chichester Festival Theatre.

Redgrave was a lifelong activist in left-wing politics. With his elder sister Vanessa, he was a prominent member of the Workers' Revolutionary Party. More recently, he became a defender of the interests of the Romani people.

Both Redgrave and his wife, Kika Markham, expressed support for Viva Palestina, a humanitarian convoy, led by British MP George Galloway, attempting to break the siege of the Gaza Strip.

Corin Redgrave represented the third generation of a theatrical dynasty spanning four generations.

• His grandparents were Roy Redgrave and Margaret Scudamore.
• His parents were Sir Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson. He wrote a biography of his father.
• His sisters were Vanessa and Lynn Redgrave; through Vanessa, his nieces were Natasha and Joely Richardson, and Carlo Gabriel Nero was his nephew.
• His first wife Deirdre Hamilton-Hill (1943-1997) gave him an acting daughter, Jemma Redgrave, best known for her title role in the British television series Bramwell; and a son, Luke, a camera operator and production assistant.
• His second wife was the actress Kika Markham, by whom he had two sons, Arden and Harvey.

In June 2005, he was described by his family as being in a "critical but stable" condition in hospital following a severe heart attack at a public meeting in Basildon, Essex.^[1] Redgrave had also been undergoing treatment for prostate cancer since 2000. His first wife, Deirdre Redgrave, died of cancer and his sister, Lynn, is in remission from breast cancer for which she was treated in recent years.

In March 2009 Corin made his return to the London stage playing the title role in Trumbo, based on the life of the blacklisted Hollywood screen writer Dalton Trumbo. On opening night Corin dedicated his performance to the memory of Natasha Richardson, his niece, who had died earlier that week following a skiing accident.

He died on 6 April 2010 in a South London hospital.^[2]

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