Joely Richardson is taking legal action after a biography made “defamatory” statements about her famous family.
Tim Adler’s unauthorised biography The House of Redgrave was released earlier this month in a daily newspaper and the actress was displeased by what she read.
In the book, Adler claims that Richardson’s mother, Vanessa Redgrave, is a Marxist and that her late bi-sexual father was caught in bed with his father-in-law.
Richardson wrote in a open letter to the Sunday Telegraph, “My mother did not walk in to find her father in bed with her husband. Silly as pie on one hand, highly defamatory on the other… My father’s bi-sexuality is a foot note is anything, not a headline of what defined his great contribution to the arts.
“My mother, for the last 20 years anyway, would not call herself a Marxist but a human-rights activist. In fact she has not been a member of any political party for decades… Does a woman who lost her eldest daughter, sister and brother within and year need to be reminded of how she might of failed loved ones 30 years ago?”
Redgrave lost her daughter Natasha Richardson in 2009 during a skiing accident and lost her bother Corin and sister Lynne both died in 2010.
Richardson ended by saying, “As a family we are taking legal action. To newspapers and publishing houses, I urge the use of facto over fiction, freedom of the press and responsibility at all times.”
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