Lynn Redgrave Cause Of Death

Lynn Redgrave, an actress upheld the tradition of her theatrically royal family on stage and on screen and as a playwright, died in 2010, at her home in Kent, Conn. She was 67.

Redgrave died of cancer. She had a mastectomy and first underwent chemotherapy in 2003.

The youngest child of the celebrated British actors Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson, Ms. Redgrave grew up in the shadow of her sister, Vanessa, and her brother, Corin, and never acquired Vanessa’s aura of stardom.

But as both a deft comedian and a commanding dramatic actress she carved out a varied career, playing parts in Shakespeare and Shaw and on “Fantasy Island.”

In the last three decades, she started on a new professional path as a writer. At her death she was at work on a solo show, her fourth play to draw on her family history. Titled “Rachel and Juliet,” it was about her relationship with her mother, who had a lifelong fascination with Shakespeare’s Juliet. She performed it in Washington last fall and in Tucson, Ariz., in January.

Indeed, for the film that made her a star when she was just 23, “Georgy Girl” (1966), she said she put on 14 pounds to play the title role: a previous generation’s Bridget Jones, a pudgy, gawky young woman whose painfully uncertain self-image leads her to sublimate her own desires to those of her acquaintances. She was nominated for an Academy Award.