It's with great dismay I've received the news about the death of lovely Natasha Richardson following a skiing accident at the resort of Mont Tremblant, Quebec, in which an apparently minor fall during a beginner's lesson resulted in a fatal brain trauma . One feels for her and her husband, Liam Neeson, and their two sons, her mother, Vanessa Redgrave, her sister, Joely, her aunt Lynn, uncle Corin and all the family. Our prayers go with her.

Natasha Richardson had her stand-out debut role in my 1986 film Gothic, co-starring Gabriel Byrne and Timothy Spall, with Thomas Dolby's orchestral score. I knew her mum, of course, the inimitable Vanessa Redgrave, and her father, Tony Richardson.

But Natasha I chose because of her ephemeral delicacy and intelligent beauty in her debut stage role as Nina in The Seagull. The lead part in Gothic for which I chose Natasha was quite a demanding role: the innocent and romantic Mary Godwin (soon to be Mary Shelley), a grounded and cautious soul pressured into psychosexual mindgames, a séance and group sex by her fiancée Shelley, the mastermind Lord Byron, his insane physician Dr Polidori and Mary's wild cousin Claire, pregnant with Byron's illegitimate child. Locked together at Byron's Geneva manse for one very long and weathery night of June 16th in 1816, they are tortured by their personal fears, absinthe-induced demons of the id, a grinning homunculus who crouches on one's chest, a woman with eyes in her breasts and grievous images of Mary's miscarried child. It's a night which gives birth to something eternal - Mary's creative masterpiece novel Frankenstein.

The role of Mary Godwin Shelley had to be played in such a way that she's the one the audience identifies with, roots for, admires and forgives for her dark night of madness with her lover and his wild pals. She must be the light in the dark night of the soul, even while she is tempted to lose her mind and senses completely.

She must be intelligent enough to write Frankenstein, a suffragette with political theories on women ahead of her time, but also must be romantic enough to be hopelessly in love with Shelley and therefore prey to following him into his exploratory sense-derangements. A sympathetic and eventually triumphant enabler, she is the moral fibre in a tale of decadence. Natasha was under pressure having such an enormously complex burden for her first film role, but she was always poised, prepared, focused and very, very bright.

We filmed in the Lake District. I remember a pivotal scene in which all of us were stuck regarding how to proceed. It was the scene in which each of the character's worst and secret fears manifests. We had a group brainstorm, Gabriel, Natasha, Timothy, Julian Sands, Miriam Cyr.

None of us in that percolating braintrust could find a workable solution to how to present the beginning of what would signal an onset of drug-effected hallucinations and the crossing of a threshold into that whole other world where shadows come to life. We each trotted out ideas but it was Natasha whose was the obvious best and we all cheered with recognition that it would indeed be the most striking way to go.

When you see that poster with acrobatic Kiran Shah perched on her chest in a parody of one of the Nightmare paintings of Henry Fuseli, 1741-1825, know that she contributed far more to that shot and the hallucination that follows than her captured pose of subjection implies. Natasha Richardson was a talented person, full of skill, insight, poetry and searing intellect.

There there is that translucent physical beauty of Natasha's, which, alas, almost upstaged her. Her physical presence was so unique and warm, inviting yet cool, vulnerable yet proud, that it almost distracts in Gothic and again in The Company of Strangers. Her beauty was golden, that's the word that keeps coming to mind. A chip off her mum's perfect bone structure, yes; but her very own blend of tenderness and fire.

I loved her in The Parent Trap - her first modern mass-appeal role in Maureen O'Hara's old role. She was a sexy anthropologist in Nell, and a prostitute-mistress in the futuristic The Handmaid's Tale. She was the perfect heroine - trapped by circumstance but resolved to outthink her way from the labyrinth. Evening, The White Countess - she was excellent. Her stage work in Closer, Cabaret, Anna Christie, Streetcar - superb. For a woman who cut her eye-teeth on Shakespeare and the classics, she was able to segue into modern roles with ease, investing them with a solidity (that husky voice of hers) and fragility at the same time - a touch of grace, which seemed to follow the family around. Would it have been so now.

She was one of the few modern actresses who was as smart as she was pretty, and as gentle as she was fierce. I loved her unashamedly, and wish her remarkable and wonderful mother, who must be suffering greatly at the moment, all courage and strength.

Over the years I've run into Corin and Vanessa (a muse of mine) and have followed Natasha's work, but had not seen Natasha personally while she made her home in New York and I in the New Forest. This recent autumn I called her agent to ask Natasha to originate the lead role in my off-Broadway play Mindgame, a thriller by Anthony Horowitz. She graciously turned it down. She would have been perfect. She always was.

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