NATASHA RICHARDSON

HOW sad the news this morning that actress Natasha Richardson has died at the age of just 45 following a skiing accident.
Her premature death comes just a year to the week after we lost ace film director Anthony Minghella in 2008 and so soon after the Attenborough family lost family members in the Tsunami.
Life is all about the living, so my heart goes out to Natasha's two children, Michael, 13 and Daniel 12, as well as to her husband, Liam Neeson, mother Vanessa Redgrave and sister Joely Richardson.
I've never met either Natasha or Liam, but I'd actually been thinking about the Schindler's List star a lot recently.
It's been fascinating to see how his most recent movie, Taken - which I'd hugely enjoyed when it was given a relatively low-key release here last September - has been a really big hit this year in the US, where it's still in the top ten.
He's such a big, strong man in the film doing anything to save his daughter, so Liam will doubtless be beside himself that, in his life, he couldn't imitate his art.
Liam almost died himself nine years ago after colliding with a deer but he remains a magnificent screen presence.
In the fullness of time, let's hope that Liam finds it within himself to carry on working once he manages to come to terms with his sad loss, thus inspiring his boys to find their own place in life.
For the rest of us, I hope Natasha's death doesn't put anybody off skiing.
Over a period of years when I was younger I really pushed myself along for six months with some really fine Austrian teachers and it was the greatest thing in terms of helping me to mentall come to terms with losing my own father at the age of just 59.
The last day I went skiing, before the financial constraints of bringing up children kicked in, I was lucky enough to have a day of wonderful weather so that I could ski off the very top of Mt Blanc all the way down into the Chamonix valley.
I'd missed the chance some years earlier when the weather wasn't right.
When the day finally came I grabbed it with both hands, whereas an American woman in our party bottled it at the very top and had to be escorted back to the lift.
For me, though, it's a memory I'll always treasure.