Her parents are Sir Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson, Lady Redgrave, her brother is Corin Redgrave and her sister is Vanessa Redgrave. She is the aunt of Natasha Richardson, Joely Richardson and Jemma Redgrave.

Lynn Redgrave's first film role was in a small part in Tom Jones in 1963. In 1966 she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for Georgy Girl.

She has worked on television, the London stage, and Broadway. She has twice been nominated for Tony Awards and is the 1977 and 1995 winner of the Sarah Siddons Award for her work in Chicago theatre.

Other films include The Happy Hooker, Every Little Crook and Nanny, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), The Big Bus, Sunday Lovers, and Shine.

From 1979 to 1981, she starred in the American television series House Calls.

In 1983, Redgrave became very well known in the United States when she began starring in a long-running series of television commercials for Weight Watchers.

In 1967 she appeared in the film Georgy Girl and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress. She was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Gods and Monsters. In the film, Kinsey, which starred her nephew-in-law, Liam Neeson, she has a brief but poignant and widely praised role.

In 2003 she appeared on Broadway in a one-woman play Shakespeare For My Father devised and co-written with her husband John Clark, who also produced and directed. The play was nominated for a Tony Award.

In 2000, Redgrave divorced her husband of 33 years, when he revealed that he had fathered a child for a family friend in need. At the family's suggestion, the friend married, then divorced, Redgrave and Clark's son Benjamin in order to gain a green card, (after which she sued the family). Details are made available at Clark's website [1], in which he reveals his legal fights. In 2002, Redgrave announced that she has breast cancer. She has written a play, The Mandrake Root, in which she starred.

As of 23 March 2005, the website of Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut states that she will be appearing live on stage in the play Sisters of the Garden, about the Mendelssohn and Boulanger sisters, on 30 March 2005.

As of early 2005, she is reported to be writing a one-woman play about her battle against cancer, from which she is evidently in remission, and her 2002 mastectomy, based on her book Journal: A Mother and Daughter's Recovery from Breast Cancer with photos by Annabel Clark (Redgrave and Clark's youngest daughter) and text by Redgrave herself.

Redgrave was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire, although she later became a naturalized citizen of the USA. She narrated Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis for Harper Audio.