Lynn Redgrave, Actress and Playwright, Dies at 67

Lynn Redgrave, Actress and Playwright, Dies at 67Lynn Redgrave, who as an actress upheld the traditionHydraulic Hoseof her theatrically royalHotel lockfamily on stage and on screen and as a playwright wrote about her family with probing affection and equally probing anguish, died on Sunday at her home in Kent, Conn. She was 67.

The cause was cancer, said Rick Miramontez, a spokesman for the Redgrave family. Ms. Redgrave had a mastectomy and first underwent chemotherapy in 2003.

The youngest child of the celebrated British actors Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson, Ms. Redgrave grew up in the shadow of her sister, Vanessa, and her brother, Corin, and never acquired Vanessa’s aura of stardom. But as both a deft comedian and a commanding dramatic actress she carved out a varied career, playing parts in Shakespeare and Shaw and on “Fantasy Island.”

In the last two decades, she started on a new professional path as a writer. At her death she was at work on a solo show, her fourth play to draw on her family history. Titled “Rachel and Juliet,” it was about her relationship with her mother, who had a lifelong fascination with Shakespeare’s Juliet. She performedHotel lockit in Washington last fall and in Tucson, Ariz., in January.

Lynn Redgrave’s death is yet another blow to this famous family. Corin Redgrave died last month. Vanessa’s daughter Natasha Richardson, Lynn’s niece, died in March 2009, an event that drew the kind of public attention the family has known all too well.

Ms. Redgrave often chafed at the outspoken political views of her sister — who was a supporter of the Palestine Liberation Organization — and in 1991, when they were performing together in London in Chekhov’sHydraulic Hose“Three Sisters,” they had a public spat after Vanessa referred to Americans asHotel lock“imperialist pigs.” (They later reconciled.)