Shock, grief over Richardson’s death

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This article was published 19/03/2009 (6356 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

NEW YORK — Natasha Richardson, a gifted and precocious heiress to acting royalty whose career highlights included the film Patty Hearst and a Tony-winning performance in a stage revival of Cabaret, died Wednesday at age 45 after suffering a head injury from a skiing accident in Quebec.

Alan Nierob, the Los Angeles-based publicist for Richardson’s husband Liam Neeson, confirmed her death in a written statement.

"Liam Neeson, his sons (Micheal and Daniel) and the entire family are shocked and devastated by the tragic death of their beloved Natasha," the statement said. "They are profoundly grateful for the support, love and prayers of everyone and ask for privacy during this very difficult time."

Neeson was reported in Toronto at the time of Richardson’s accident, filming the movie Chloe with Julianne Moore.

Producers confirmed Neeson immediately left the Toronto set upon news of his wife’s accident.

The statement did not give details on the cause of death for Richardson, who suffered a head injury when she fell on a beginner’s trail during a private ski lesson at the luxury Mont Tremblant ski resort in Quebec. She was taken to hospital Tuesday in Montreal and later flown to a hospital in New York.

.Family members had been seen coming and going from the New York hospital where Richardson was taken.

Vanessa Redgrave, Richardson’s mother, arrived in a car with darkened windows and was taken through a garage when she arrived at the Lenox Hill Hospital on Manhattan’s Upper East Side about 5 p.m. ET on Wednesday. An hour earlier, Richardson’s sister, Joely, arrived alone and was swarmed by the media as she entered through the back of the hospital.

It was a sudden and horrifying loss for her family and friends, for the film and theatre communities, for her many fans and for both her native and adoptive countries. Descended from at least three generations of actors, Richardson was a proper Londoner who came to love New York, an elegant blonde with large, lively eyes, a bright smile and a hearty laugh.

If she never quite attained the acting heights of her Academy Award-winning mother, she still had enjoyed a long and worthy career. As an actress, Richardson was equally adept at passion and restraint, able to portray besieged women both confessional (Tennessee Williams’ Blanche DuBois) and confined (the concubine in the futuristic horror of The Handmaid’s Tale).

Like other family members, she divided her time between stage and screen. On Broadway, she won a Tony for her performance as Sally Bowles in a 1998 revival of Cabaret. She also appeared in New York in a production of Patrick Marber’s Closer (1999) as well as 2005 revival of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, in which she played Blanche opposite John C. Reilly’s Stanley Kowalski.

She met Neeson when they made their Broadway debuts in 1993, co-starring in Anna Christie, Eugene O’Neill’s drama about a former prostitute and the sailor who falls in love with her.

"The astonishing Natasha Richardson… gives what may prove to be the performance of the season as Anna, turning a heroine who has long been portrayed (and reviled) as a whore with a heart of gold into a tough, ruthlessly unsentimental apostle of O’Neill’s tragic understanding of life," New York Times critic Frank Rich wrote.

Her most notable film roles came earlier in her career. Richardson played the title character in Paul Schrader’s Patty Hearst, a 1988 biopic about the kidnapped heiress for which the actress became so immersed that even between scenes she wore a blindfold, the better to identify with her real-life counterpart.

 

— The Associated Press

 

Victim of ‘walk and die’ syndrome?

THE head injury Natasha Richardson suffered in a skiing accident Monday produced what is often called a "walk and die," syndrome, which is usually due to delayed bleeding from an artery in the brain, said Dr. Christopher Giza, a neurologist at the University of California, Los Angeles’ Brain Injury Research Center.

In such cases, the patients, like Richardson, appear normal immediately after the injury, walking and talking as though nothing happened. But symptoms can develop within an hour, causing the patients first to suffer impaired speech and vision and then to fall into a coma.

The actress most likely suffered from an epidural hematoma, in which bleeding occurs from an artery in the brain, according to Giza. Because blood in arteries is under high pressure, it can accumulate rapidly in the organ, pushing the brain to one side and leaking down into the brainstem, where it can "cause a change in mental status, the onset of a coma or, in severe cases, kill the person," Giza said. "In general, to have this kind of hemorrhage, you have to experience a significant amount of force."

— Los Angeles Times