Stanley Kauffmann

“Vanessa Redgrave is a divinity. If you think that legends about great actresses of the past are nothing but blather about the now-undisprovable, see Redgrave in virtually anything and you will see the stuff of those legends living and proved. Julia is far from a demanding role—for her—and you can see how she exceeds it, how easily she fills it with everything it was meant to hold and then, just as easily, makes it a bit bigger. Everything that is said about Julia, every attribute of generosity, brain, nobility, is so immediately true that love of Julia quickly replaces any questioning of Redgrave. Like most great actresses, her beauty is part of her talent: the first time we see Redgrave’s face, after some episodes with the two girls as children and teenagers, it’s like the sun after the first light. To see Redgrave striding toward us from the distance under the arches of Oxford, her scholar’s gown swinging, is to see eccentricity made central, grace rendered with humor. The way she reads Herrick’s “Upon Julia’s Clothes” (in her book Hellman wrongly attributes the poem to Donne) is shaped like a small antique enameled box. The scenes in the Vienna hospital, wrapped and racked, the last scene in the Berlin café—they give a new shine to the word “genuine.”

“I expected the casting of Fonda and Redgrave to be a wonderful match. It turns out to be a bit one-sided, not in contest but in art. Fonda, as I was early to say and still know, is exceptionally gifted; but here Redgrave cuts finer and goes further, even allowing for the fact that she has the better part….”

Stanley Kauffmann
The New Republic, October 15, 1977
Before My Eyes, p. 295