Secret Dreams: a biography of Michael Redgrave Alan Strachan Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 484pp, £25 ISBN 0297607642

The beginning of the end of Michael Redgrave's acting career came not on stage but in a cramped dressing room at the Old Vic, where in 1964 he had sweated through the first night of Ibsen's The Master Builder as Solness. Laurence Olivier, in his first season running the new National Theatre, seized the young director Peter Wood and dragged him backstage. After an awkward pause during which Redgrave stared at the mirror, Olivier wielded the dagger: "You must know that this evening you made a fool of yourself. You have made a fool of the other actors. You have made a fool of Peter here, and you have made a fool of the young National Theatre. And you have made a fool of me. Next season we will commence the season with this production. I will play Solness. Maggie and Joan will alternate Hilde. I cordially invite you to the first performance."

This story is one of many highlights in Alan Strachan's comprehensive new biography, which the author hopes will restore its subject to his rightful place alongside Olivier, Richardson and Gielgud as the fourth member of the great quartet of 20th-century British stage actors. Strachan writes: "For one actor to treat another in such a manner, especially at such a vulnerable time, is beyond excuse." Olivier's envious contempt for Redgrave emerges powerfully from this book. Redgrave's career, unlike those of his contemporaries, never had an Indian summer. Although he lived another two decades after his gladiatorial showdown with Olivier, his confidence didn't recover and, ravaged by Parkinson's disease, he died aged 75.

Few professions are more ephemeral than stage acting, and it is hard for a biographer to capture the essence of a performer who was at his peak half a century ago. Redgrave was unlucky in that his glory years were chronicled by James Agate and Kenneth Tynan, both of whom mostly dismissed his talent. When Redgrave played Hamlet at Stratford in 1958, Tynan damned him with faint praise: "Something is missing. We admire, but are not involved . . . Just as we think he is about to break through to us, something within him shies and bolts. He withdraws into his solitude, and when next we look, the windows are shuttered." Strachan eloquently demolishes the view that Redgrave was an over-intellectual actor, tracing the development of his style to the ideas of Stanislavsky and the inspiration of director Michel Saint-Denis in the 1930s.

Strachan's biography complements the memoirs of Redgrave's widow, Rachel Kempson, who died last year, and those of his children, Vanessa, Corin and Lynn. It is packed with details from the family archives, drawing on Redgrave's previously unpublished diary and correspondence with his wife.

Strachan's approach to the complicated issue of Redgrave's bisexuality, which Kempson knew about and accepted, is refreshingly matter-of-fact. Redgrave's many male lovers included Noel Coward, the captain of rugger at Cranleigh (the Surrey public school Redgrave taught at before becoming an actor), a series of blackmailing guardsmen and three handsome Americans who successively shared his marital home. But the real betrayal, which he kept secret for around 40 years, was an affair with Edith Evans while Kempson was pregnant with their first child. Some biographers would have rebuked Redgrave for his infidelities, but that is not Strachan's style.

Secret Dreams is fluently written and meticulously edited, and avoids theatrical gush, speculative psychobabble and un-reliable anecdotes. Strachan discusses Redgrave's weaknesses as an actor intelligently and persuasively, yet after 450 pages I felt no closer to understanding Redgrave the man. He remains a shadowy and secretive figure on whose secret dreams, as Tynan put it, the windows are still shuttered.

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