In 2009, the year before he died, the actor and playwright Corin Redgrave came up with what he thought was a brilliant plot idea. 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. 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.
Redgrave never did write that play. 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. 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. In a therapy session, the doctor asked Corin what he remembered of the past. “I know we were happy,” he said. “And I know I loved Kika, but I can’t remember our life together.”
At that moment, recalls Kika in her new book, “I understood that both our lives had disappeared. For what use are memories if they only exist for one person?”
Such a disability would have been a bitter blow in any marriage, but for Kika and Corin it seemed especially hard. 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. And their fathers, Michael Redgrave and David Markham, acted together in the 1940 film The Stars Look Down. But it wasn’t until their 30s that Kika and Corin discovered that they were in love.
At the time, Corin was separated from Deirdre Hamilton-Hill, mother of their children, Luke and Jemma. Kika had had several long-term relationships, including a tumultuous liaison with the French film director, François Truffaut.
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). 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. “She spotted me from afar and shouted, ‘There’s that dreadful woman! She’s mad and sees a shrink every week [I did] and she’s in that awful party that ruined Corin’s marriage!’”
According to Kika, the relationship was patched up a few years later, when Rachel welcomed her with the words “Forgive me.”
But whatever the attitude in the Redgrave family to the marriage, much of it was hard-going. Corin was devoted to the WRP, to the extent that for many years he prioritised political activism over his theatrical work; in any case, he was blacklisted and shunned by some television companies and directors because of his political views. Money was short, Corin was always caught up in the political battle of the moment, and Kika was often alone in looking after their sons, Arden and Harvey. In 1999, just as things seemed to be getting easier, Corin was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and Kika was by his side through long months of treatment. “So by 2005, I was looking forward to an easier life,” says Kika. “I thought our later years would be our fun time. We’d come through a lot, including cancer and I thought things would get easier from now on in.”
But then Corin had the heart attack. “If it hadn’t been for a traveller who gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, he’d have died there and then,” says Kika. However, his brain was starved of oxygen for seven minutes; at one point, she was told there was little hope that her husband would survive.
The Corin who arrived home from hospital to recuperate seemed the same, but as the weeks passed it was obvious that he had changed profoundly. He began to get angry and paranoid and had psychotic episodes; the doctors suggested he should be admitted to a closed psychiatric unit. Kika was torn: she couldn’t bear the thought of him being held against his will, but nor did she think she could manage at home. “Then Vanessa [his sister, the actress Vanessa Redgrave] stepped in and very bravely offered to take him home to live with her,” she says. Was she better at dealing with him at this stage of his life? “It’s difficult to say … but she had known him all his life – and that makes a difference with something like this.”
Kika was heavily involved in Corin’s care when he was living with Vanessa but it was, she relates in her book, “gut-wrenchingly horrible” to have to go home without him. But things were about to get even worse. A month after moving to Vanessa’s, Corin had a serious psychotic episode that resulted in him being sectioned under the Mental Health Act.
Even now, says Kika, her chest tightens when she remembers his face behind the bars of the hospital window. “It is truly terrible to see a distinguished-looking, ‘civilised’ older man crying without restraint in bitterness and sorrow because he cannot understand what is going on or why he is being held prisoner,” she writes.
Gradually, though, things got better, and eventually Corin went home. Kika and Vanessa were convinced that returning to work would be good for him. He was offered a part in a film about the liberation of Belsen, as an army major, with his daughter Jemma playing a Red Cross nurse (they had always wanted to work together). Corin coped well, but in his diary, after his death, Kika found this entry that revealed how he felt: “Filming. Trying to work out where I was, what I was doing. At times I felt like a man who has fallen overboard from an immense liner.”
For Kika, the role of supportive wife to a husband with brain damage was proving the challenge of her life. “The dilemma was that, if I tried to probe Corin too much about what he knew or didn’t know, I risked making him feel more worried and unstable about his situation. In many ways, I had to stand back and not push too much.”
Corin was often confused about what had happened to him, where he was and what was going on. Work, was his salvation – and, against all the odds, some of his best performances were still to come. He gave an acclaimed performance of Oscar Wilde in De Profundis in 2008, and the following year read the letters of the Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who had been blacklisted for being a communist, in a show that opened on the night it was announced that his niece, Natasha Richardson, was dead after a skiing accident. He went ahead, dedicating his performance to her memory and delivering a heartfelt tribute without any notes.
That, says Kika, was the odd thing about Corin’s brain injury: when he was on stage it somehow melted away, and he was as impressive and commanding and passionate as he had ever been. “It was astonishing,” says Kika. “When he played Wilde he was totally in the present; you didn’t see Corin crying, you saw Oscar Wilde crying. He brought all his suffering, everything he’d been through, to his performance – he was so brave and so sad.”
It’s tempting to ask about the so-called “Redgrave curse” but, like all the Redgraves, Kika will have no truck with it. “I don’t think we feel in the family that we have bad luck,” she says. “But some of the events have been overwhelming and very difficult for us all to deal with. For Vanessa to have all those losses [Natasha and both her siblings within 14 months] was shocking.” In her book, Kika writes movingly of a visit with Vanessa and her partner, the actor Franco Nero, to Tuscany a few months after Natasha’s death, when the three of them visited a tiny church and lit candles in Natasha’s memory.
Throughout Corin’s illness, Vanessa was more involved in his care than their sister Lynn because she was living in the US. But, says Kika, when Corin was offered the chance to play Kenneth Tynan in New York in 2009, it gave the three Redgrave siblings a last chance to spend a few weeks together. “Vanessa took him over and the three of them stayed at Lynn’s house in Connecticut. It was amazing for them to be back together again – I think they had six weeks or so together.”
When Corin died in April 2010, after collapsing at home, Lynn (who was suffering from the breast cancer that killed her less than a month later) rushed over from New York, but by the time she arrived, he had already died.
Today, Kika is in her sunny sitting room in south London, surrounded by photographs of Redgraves and Markhams on stage and off; above her fireplace is a photograph of the couple acting together. She describes herself as a reluctant author: her account of Corin’s illness began as an aide-memoire for him. As time went on, she hoped that when he recovered they might write a book together about his experience of brain injury. But it wasn’t to be and Kika’s decision to go ahead was prompted, she says, by the hope that it would help others facing similar difficulties. “Problems you can see – blood, shit, vomit, cancer – are your friends in comparison with brain injury,” she says. “It’s the unseen, the unknowable, that makes it all so very difficult to deal with.”
She feels guilty that she survived their final struggle together, while Corin died; and she worries now that she didn’t do enough for him when he was alive, though having listened to her talk about her husband’s later years, it’s hard to imagine anyone could have done more. But the strange thing is, she says, that the years since his illness – and now since his death – have been very successful for her professionally: as we talk, the script for the next episode of the TV series Mr Selfridge, in which she plays the mother of the store’s founder, Harry Gordon Selfridge, is on her coffee table.
She has no plans to retire and you can’t help wondering whether the fun years, the ones she hoped to share with Corin, could still be ahead.
There are grandchildren, after all: her elder son, Harvey, has two children, Edie, four, and Leo, who is two. Her eyes light up as she shows me a photograph of Edie, who is all dressed up and doing a dance.
“Some of the Redgrave genes are there, I think,” she says quietly.
• Our Time of Day: My Life with Corin Redgrave by Kika Markham is published by Oberon Books, £16.99. To order a copy for £13.59 with free UK p&p, go to theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846
Kika Markham will be at the National Theatre, South Bank, London SE1, on 24 September to talk about the book and her life with Corin Redgrave
• This feature was amended on 22 September 2014 to clarify four points. Corin Redgrave was given mouth-to-mouth resuscitation by a Traveller, not a Gypsy; he had been separated from his wife, Deirdre, for three years before the relationship with Kika Markham commenced; Harvey is Kika Markham’s elder son, not her younger son. Also the term “mental illness” has been changed by request to “brain injury” in a quote attributed to Kika Markham
