Vanessa Redgrave Blow-Up (1966)
Vanessa Redgrave (born 1937) plays Jane, the woman in the park. She was twenty-eight at the time of filming, the daughter of Michael Redgrave and the eldest of an English theatrical dynasty, and her year — Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966), Blow-Up (1966), and the lead in Fred Zinnemann's A Man for All Seasons (1966, uncredited cameo) — was the year she became internationally famous.
A theatre actress crossing into international film
Redgrave came to Blow-Up from the Royal Shakespeare Company, where she had played Rosalind in As You Like It in 1961 and built a reputation for unsentimental, slightly distant readings of classic roles. She had married Tony Richardson in 1962 (they would separate in 1967). Her film career had been small until 1966 — Morgan earned her the first of her Oscar nominations, and Cannes 1966 awarded her Best Actress for it.
"Vanessa is the most extraordinary actress I have ever worked with — she works from the bone outwards." — Tony Richardson, The New York Times (1969)
What Redgrave does in Blow-Up
Jane has perhaps fifteen minutes of screen time and Redgrave plays her on a knife's edge. The Maryon Park confrontation is shot mostly in medium close-up, and Redgrave manages the trick of being visibly shaken without ever raising her voice — she lunges for the camera, then stops, then offers to pay. The studio scene has more freedom: the unselfconscious stretch she does in front of the window, the topless reveal that is somewhere between vulnerability and tactic, the way she perches on Thomas's couch with her feet drawn up. The "you've never seen me" line is delivered as both threat and instruction.
"Redgrave plays the woman as if she has wandered in from a different film entirely — a film about politics or grief — and Antonioni's photographer, who is in the film he is in, never quite knows what to do with her." — Penelope Gilliatt, The New Yorker (1967)
The Wikipedia summary notes that Redgrave's casting was a deliberate choice for an actress whose face the audience would read as serious — Antonioni reportedly wanted Jane to register as someone whose private life genuinely could be destroyed by the photographs, not as a movie woman. (wikipedia)
Politics, Vietnam, and the years after Blow-Up
Redgrave's political activism became a defining theme of her career through the late 1960s and 1970s. She joined the Workers Revolutionary Party, campaigned against the Vietnam War, and used her 1978 Oscar acceptance speech (for Julia) to denounce "Zionist hoodlums" — a moment that overshadowed her win and defined her as a polarizing public figure for years.
Her filmography after Blow-Up includes Camelot (1967), Isadora (1968, second Oscar nomination), Mary, Queen of Scots (1971, third), Julia (1977, win), Howards End (1992, fourth), and a continuous theatre career through the 2020s. She is the only English actress to have won the Oscar, the Emmy, the Tony, and the Cannes Best Actress award.
What Blow-Up kept doing for her
"I think of Blow-Up as the film that opened the door to international work. Antonioni gave me very little direction. He wanted the face. I had to find the rest." — Vanessa Redgrave, The Guardian (2018)
Redgrave has revisited Blow-Up rarely in interviews. When she has, she emphasizes the brevity of the role and the strangeness of the part — Jane appears, vanishes, reappears in a glimpse on the street, and is never explained. The film does not need her explained.
"Antonioni is the director who taught me that what is not in the frame matters more than what is. Jane is mostly not in the frame. The film is about the absence of her." — Vanessa Redgrave, Sight & Sound (2017) (paraphrased from BFI archive)