JOELY RICHARDSON Biography - Actors and Actresses

 
 

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JOELY RICHARDSON

Name: Joely Kim Richardson                                                                 
Born: 9 January 1965 London, England                                                       
                                                                                           
Joely Kim Richardson (born January 9, 1965) is an English actress.                         
                                                                                           
Richardson was born in London to a theatrical family, the daughter of actress             
Vanessa Redgrave and late director Tony Richardson, the granddaughter of Sir               
Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson, Lady Redgrave, sister of actress Natasha             
Richardson, and sister-in-law of actor Liam Neeson, and niece of Lynn Redgrave             
and Corin Redgrave. Joely Richardson appeared as an extra at the age of three in           
the 1968 version of The Charge of the Light Brigade directed by her father.               
                                                                                           
Joely had an early ambition to become a professional tennis player and spent two           
years at a tennis academy in Florida. She then turned to acting. In 1985 she               
portrayed, via flashbacks, the younger version of the leading character played             
by her mother in the film Wetherby. After a leading role in Peter Greenaway's             
cult success Drowning by Numbers, her first major role in front of a mass                 
audience was as Joanna Farley in a 1989 television episode of Poirot, the Agatha           
Christie-based detective series. She portrayed a teacher on the verge of a                 
nervous breakdown in the 1989 Channel 4 miniseries Behaving Badly and fictional           
Finnish Princess Anna in the 1991 screen comedy King Ralph.                               
                                                                                           
A year later, she appeared in Shining Through alongside her future brother-in-law         
Liam Neeson, where both played characters depicted as Nazis.                               
                                                                                           
In 1993, Richardson appeared as Lady Chatterley opposite Sean Bean in a                   
television drama of the same title. In 1996, she played fashion designer Anita             
in the Disney live-action remake of the animated 101 Dalmatians opposite Glenn             
Close as Cruella de Vil. In 1998, in the popular television drama The Echo, she           
played sultry Amanda Powell. The next year, she played in the sci-fi/horror               
movie Event Horizon as Lieutenant Starck, executive officer of the research and           
rescue ship Lewis and Clark, sent to rescue crew of the long-thought-lost                 
experimental ship Event Horizon.                                                           
                                                                                           
One year later, Richardson played opposite Mel Gibson in the film The Patriot,             
an American fiction based on the American Revolution. She also made a notable             
appearance in the comedy King Ralph opposite John Goodman. Later that year she             
was modelling a necklace, when director Charles Shyer noticed her resemblance to           
doomed 18th-century French Queen Marie Antoinette. Thus, she secured the role of           
that queen in the 2001 film The Affair of the Necklace. Also in 2000, she played           
opposite Hugh Laurie in Maybe Baby, Ben Elton's movie adaptation of his book               
Inconceivable.                                                                             
                                                                                           
In 2003, Richardson took on the role of Julia McNamara in the television drama             
Nip/Tuck, based on the lives of two dysfunctional plastic surgeons in Miami. Her           
mother, Vanessa Redgrave, has appeared in several episodes, playing her                   
character's mother.                                                                       
                                                                                           
In 2005, Richardson starred in Lies My Mother Told Me, based on a true story               
about a murderous con artist. In 2007 she played the mother in The Last Mimzy             
with Timothy Hutton, Chris O'Neil, and Rhiannon Leigh Wryn.