KEY POINTS:
One can only imagine the pressures felt by the young Joely Richardson. She was born into the fourth generation of arguably the world's most celebrated acting dynasty, and it looked for some time as if the youngest daughter of actress Vanessa Redgrave and director Tony Richardson might somehow fail to live up to expectations to make it in the family trade.
It was not until the "ripe old age of 35" that she finally cracked it. Until then Richardson could boast only a "choppy" career trajectory.
There was a competent performance in Peter Greenaway's Drowning By Numbers, an appearance alongside Glenn Close in Disney's 101 Dalmatians, and a smattering of TV roles, from Poirot to Lady Chatterley.
But she enjoyed nothing like the acclaim heaped on her great-grandfather, Roy Redgrave, an Australian silent movie legend; her illustrious grandfather, Sir Michael Redgrave; her parents, or actress sister Natasha.
But her casting in the cult US TV hit Nip/Tuck as Julia McNamara, the errant wife of Miami plastic surgeon Sean McNamara, played by Dylan Walsh, changed all that. She won a Golden Globe nomination and was transformed into one of Hollywood's hottest stars. The fourth series of the macabre lipo-suction saga went to air in the US in September. The year-old third series is showing in New Zealand at present.
However, Richardson, 41, is standing down to spend more time looking after her sick daughter. Daisy, her 15-year-old daughter, has a rare circulatory disease which has weakened the walls and the valves of her veins and hampers the flow of blood around her body.
Diagnosed at the age of 1, Daisy has been in and out of hospital for several years and is scheduled for a series of operations on her legs.
Facing up to her daughter's illness has marked a watershed in the actress' life, and has forced Richardson to re-evaluate her priorities. "Surgeons and hospitals have been a big part of our lives," she said. "We were always told that she would have to have more surgery when she got older. The time has come. What the future holds, nobody can say. It's all up in the air. And I don't know if I will ever be here again.
"I love my work. But I had to be in two places at once and I thought, 'If it were all over tomorrow, what would I regret?' It would be not being there for her. It had to be done but it was scary," she said.
Richardson's spokeswoman said her absence from Nip/Tuck had been agreed with the producers before the latest series went to air.
"Her daughter's surgery has been arranged for some time and this is not some life-threatening illness," she said. "We have not made any decisions just yet about whether Joely will return to the show next year."
However, Richardson admitted that she feared incurring the wrath of the show's producers. She said: "You think, 'Oh my God, are they going to sue me?' "
The actress's off-screen predicament (warning spoilers ahead) is reflected in the sub-plot in Nip/Tuck, in which her character's baby suffers a rare genetic disorder, ectrodactylism, in which the bones of the hands and feet are fused.
But series creator Ryan Murphy said he hoped his star would return soon.
"It was sad, but Joely came before her character," he said. "The dynamic of the show changed with the difficulty of what she was going through, plus what she is going through on the show this season, playing the mother of a deformed baby. That said, Joely's the best she's ever been. I don't want to do the show without her."
Filming for Nip/Tuck has taken its toll on the star. She has been alternating between spending six months at her home in west London and the remaining six on the set of the show in Los Angeles. Although Daisy joins her for long periods in America, Richardson says she misses her daughter badly when she is at school in Britain.
Filming is gruelling with the cast required to work 18-hour days. Her marriage to New Zealand-born film producer Tim Bevan (Four Weddings and a Funeral) hit the rocks amid a welter of publicity. The star has not remarried although she has been linked with co-star John Hensley who plays her teenage son in the show despite being only 12 years younger.
The show also brings mother and daughter together on screen. Vanessa Redgrave, 69, appeared in two series, including one memorable scene where she smokes cannabis alongside her daughter.
Richardson's decision to sacrifice work for family throws into stark relief public comments she has made regarding her own childhood, especially her turbulent relationship with her mother.
She has admitted to uncomfortable feelings growing up in the shadow of a woman lionised on the one hand as the finest classical actress of her generation, and lampooned on the other for her support for the Trotskyite Workers' Revolutionary Party, an organisation she fronted alongside her brother Corin.
Richardson grew up in a self-consciously average home in Hammersmith, west London. A middling student, Richardson quit the academically rigorous St Paul's Girls' School in London to pursue a tennis scholarship in Santa Barbara, close to her father's home in Los Angeles.
She says it was from him, the pioneering director of Look Back in Anger, The Entertainer and Saturday Night Sunday Morning, that she sought approval. After school in California she enrolled at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London.
She admits there were troubled times during her teens and her 20s but says that it is all in the past and today Vanessa is the ideal grandmother.
"Do I now resent my mother not being there? No. There comes a point where you have to let it go and say that's the way it is. Also when you have kids, it's like, 'Oh, I see, it wasn't as easy as I thought'."
Who: Joely Richardson
What: Nip/Tuck
Where and when: TV2, 9.30pm tonight
- INDEPENDENT
