“She spotted me from afar and shouted, ‘There’s that dreadful woman! She’s mad and sees a shrink every week and she’s in that awful party that ruined Corin’s marriage!’”Īccording to Kika, the relationship was patched up a few years later, when Rachel welcomed her with the words “Forgive me.” In her book, Kika remembers Rachel’s response to seeing her demonstrating at the Granada rehearsal rooms in favour of union rights for Equity members. Marrying into the Redgraves wasn’t always easy for Kika: although Corin’s family were just as radically socialist as the Markhams, Rachel Kempson seemed to blame Kika for encouraging her son’s membership of the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP).

Kika had had several long-term relationships, including a tumultuous liaison with the French film director, François Truffaut.

But it wasn’t until their 30s that Kika and Corin discovered that they were in love.Īt the time, Corin was separated from Deirdre Hamilton-Hill, mother of their children, Luke and Jemma. And their fathers, Michael Redgrave and David Markham, acted together in the 1940 film The Stars Look Down. Theirs had not been an easy partnership, although their theatrical families were entwined from childhood – Kika’s mother, Olive, knitted a blanket for the baby that Rachel Kempson was expecting in 1939, and Rachel reciprocated with a hand-knitted cardigan for Olive the following year when she had Kika. Such a disability would have been a bitter blow in any marriage, but for Kika and Corin it seemed especially hard. For what use are memories if they only exist for one person?” “And I know I loved Kika, but I can’t remember our life together.”Īt that moment, recalls Kika in her new book, “I understood that both our lives had disappeared. In a therapy session, the doctor asked Corin what he remembered of the past.

Kika remembers the devastation she felt on the day Corin admitted that his heart attack, while making a speech at a rally to fight the Dale Farm travellers’ eviction in 2005, had left her husband with a big black hole where the story of their life together should have been. Instead he lived it – was living it, in fact, when he had the idea with his wife, Kika Markham, that he might fictionalise their own desperate situation. For all he knows, she might be an imposter and the stories she has told him of their life together might have been made up. His new play would focus on a man who has brain damage as the result of a heart attack, and who later admits to his wife that he has no memories whatsoever of their 20-plus years of marriage. I n 2009, the year before he died, the actor and playwright Corin Redgrave came up with what he thought was a brilliant plot idea.

UNIT by Jemma Redgrave