Stage, film actress Lynn Redgrave dies

Lynn Redgrave, a member of the distinguished British acting family who became an overnight sensation playing the title character in the 1966 film “Georgy Girl,” and later achieved acclaim on stage as both an actress and a writer, has died. She was 67.

Redgrave died Sunday with her children at her side at her home in Kent, Conn., said her publicist, Rick Miramontez.

“Our beloved mother Lynn Rachel passed away peacefully after a seven-year journey with breast cancer,” her children, Ben, Pema and Annabel, said in a statement Monday. “She lived, loved and worked harder than ever before.”

Redgrave’s death comes on the heels of that of her actor brother, Corin, who died after a short illness last month. Her niece, Natasha Richardson, died of head injuries caused by a fall on a ski slope last year.

Redgrave’s last stage appearance was in January, at the Invisible Theatre in Tucson, Ariz., where she performed her solo show “Rachel and Juliet.”

“She talked about theater as the best doctor in the world,” Susan Claassen, the Invisible Theatre’s managing artistic director, said Monday. “You would never guess there was anything wrong when she was on stage.”

The youngest of renowned actor Sir Michael Redgrave and actress Rachel Kempson’s three children – and the sister of Oscar-winning actress Vanessa Redgrave – Redgrave often said she was “the child of whom nothing was really expected.”

She made her film debut playing a barmaid named Susan in the 1963 film “Tom Jones.”

Her career-making role as the overweight and unglamorous young Londoner in the British comedy “Georgy Girl” earned her an Oscar nomination for best actress in a leading role.

In 1999, she won a Golden Globe and received an Oscar nomination for best actress in a supporting role playing the Hungarian housekeeper in “Gods and Monsters,” the biopic about homosexual film director James Whale starring Ian McKellen.