Quotes / Michael Redgrave

"I cannot remember how he introduced the subject when, after an interminably long pause during which each of us, it seemed, had become absorbed into his own thoughts, he spoke again. Probably there was no introduction. I remember that his breathing seemed strained and difficult. "I think I ought to tell you", he said, "that I am, to say the least of it, bisexual." I recall every syllable of that sentence, with its strange qualification "to say the least of it", because it took him an age to say it and the pauses, which were more or less as I have punctuated them, were painful. In each pause he breathed more deeply, to the bottom of his lungs, letting the air out with a punctured sigh, his shoulders sagging forward. When he had finished he stared at me, angrily, as if I had forced him to speak, as if I had taken advantage of his too trusting nature, and then came three huge, heaving sobs, "Aaaagh.... aaagh... aaagh", and then the dam burst and his grief and his rage came out in a great, terrrible, heaving cascade.

I had often seen my father cry. He cried freely, without any attempt at restraint, and I was always grateful to have learned from him that there is nothing wrong with crying; quite the contrary. But I had never seen him cry like this. It was beyond anything I had experienced, a grief so awful that it seemed to undo him. I sat on the arm of his armchair, folded my arms around his neck, and when eventually he quietened a little I said, "I know". He said, "Do you?". And that was all. The end of the conversation."

— Corin Redgrave in his memoir, Michael Redgrave, My Father, on his father's struggle to accept his bisexuality

"Michael Redgrave and Dirk Bogarde in The Sea Shall Not Have Them? I don't see why not. Everyone else has."

—Noël Coward on seeing a poster of the film The Sea Shall Not Have Them featuring closeted bisexual Redgrave and closeted gay Bogarde, on their reputation as Really Getting Around