Citizen-to-Be Redgrave Hosts White House TV Show

Lynn Redgrave took a break from her new series, “Chicken Soup,” to host the season’s second edition of PBS’s “In Performance in the White House” (taped Sept. 17, airing a week from today), based on a Columbus Day theme of immigrants.

Redgrave, who holds an immigrant’s green card, is planning to become an American citizen. She said she felt honored to be the first not-yet-American citizen invited to host “In Performance.”

Her youngest child, Annabel, 8, was born in Southern California. But Redgrave explained that “by sheer chance we (son Ben, daughter Kelly and herself) were the first people who got green cards on the first day of the Bicentennial, at 9 a.m. on Jan. 1, 1976, in New York. So it says on our green cards, ‘officially admitted to this country as an immigrant.’ ”

Her husband, John Clark, immigrated to Canada and then to the United States in the early ‘60s. They married in New York in 1967, then “we kept coming back until ‘74, when we stayed for good.

“I don’t have to do it,” she said of becoming an American citizen. “I can’t vote, and I can’t hold public office, and I can stay in this stage for the rest of my life. But there comes a point when you want to make it your home and feel accepted by the country, which I feel I am.

“It was a kind of final acceptance--for a non-American to host a program at the White House was special. It’s a sort of sentimental gesture to myself because it’s no big deal to anybody else whether I become an American--but it’s a big deal for me.”

Opera singer Teresa Stratas’ rendition of “Lost in the Stars” brought tears to many, Redgrave reported, and so did dramatic readings that she and F. Murray Abraham gave from material written by immigrants.

“They were wonderful pieces, what I call civilian pieces--not show-biz people, not celebrities--about leaving the old country and what they found in the new country. All so different, some humorous, some very touching.

“There was something about doing the immigrant theme--everybody got all teary-eyed. The President’s brother and sister were crying during some of the pieces.”