Watching Joely sitting across a big square table from me at the Sony Club in Manhattan, it struck me that here was a little sister that I knew I’d like. We would have things to talk about, secrets to share. It was a quality — a little rebelliousness, a little hard-won self-acceptance — that flashed in her fair eyes. It was the way she actually listened and connected, the way she was living in the minute, even though she’d been chasing Anonymous premieres and talking to journalists across continents.

Richardson told tales on her mother, Vanessa Redgrave, who shared the role of Elizabeth 1 (Mum’s the older, Joely the younger, royal) in this rollicking thriller about the attribution of Shakespeare’s plays directed by Roland Emmerich and written by John Orloff. It was a detail that a daughter would notice: that her mother had insisted that she have a Tudor Rose patch on her costume and that, whatever the authenticity of the item, it stuck out like a dime-store broach.

Joely was able to laugh at her self for noticing, laugh at her mother for not being able to resist, and understand that this was part of Vanessa’s method. Props, it turns out, are big for Vanessa. Joely told a story about her mother saying, in one of her many parts, that her character needed a cup just there; she would be drinking just that. These props grounded Vanessa, connected her to the woman on the page and brought her to life, but the habit could be as fussy as a Tudor Rose tacked on to a beaded and bejeweled Elizabethan bodice.

Joely said that when her mother got nervous, she got fussy, her energy vibrating. The daughter made a motion like dual electric fans in the air. She preferred her mother’s more still moments. I recalled my favorite scene in the movie Evening, when Meryl Streep and Vanessa share a bed, and lying beside each other, old friends reconciled, the pair deliver a great moment of stillness and depth in cinema in a lesser movie.

 

 

The movie had a bit of stunt casting: Meryl’s daughter Mamie Gummer and Vanessa’s daughter Natasha joined their mothers on-screen. Joely said that what she remembered of that movie was the idea of the passage of time and missed opportunities, things left unsaid to loved ones long-gone.

I suppose at that moment we were both thinking of Joely’s late sister Natasha, swept off the planet too soon, with so much left unsaid. I know I was thinking of Joely’s older sister. It was a connection that I wanted to mention to Joely — Natasha and my sons go to the same school, and we’d circled each others’ lives in upstate Millbrook, crossing paths on Halloween in the village. And a name that I would never have mentioned at a studio lunch. But, it seems, that Natasha was also in the room, reminding us to take this minute because Evening is coming.

As I left the Sony Building on Madison Avenue, I saw Joely smoking a cigarette on the sidewalk, alone. She looked over her shoulder and smiled, gently, warmly. I’d like to think that we little sisters will continue our discussion at some later time.