Natasha Richardson injured in ski accident

The actress Natasha Richardson has been critically injured in a skiing accident at the Mont Tremblant resort in eastern Canada. Richardson, the daughter of Vanessa Redgrave and Tony Richardson, and wife of Liam Neeson (pictured together), is understood to be receiving treatment for a brain injury in a specialist hospital in Montreal.

Neeson, who was filming a new movie, Chloe, with Julianne Moore in Toronto, has flown to Montreal to be by her side.

Richardson, 45, has performed on stage in London and New York - she won a Tony Award in 1998 for Cabaret - and appeared in more than 30 films, including Patty Hearst, The Parent Trap and - at the age of four - her father's 1968 film The Charge of the Light Brigade. She has been married to Neeson, star of Schindler's List, since 1994 and the couple have two sons.

She is a member of one of the British theatre's great dynasties. Her grandparents were Sir Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson; her younger sister, Joely Richardson, is also an actress; and she is the niece of Lynn Redgrave and Corin Redgrave.

It is understood that she is due to appear with her mother in a Broadway revival next year of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music, following the success of a one-off fundraising performance the pair gave in January.

Mont Tremblant, where the accident happened on Monday, is a popular ski resort in the Laurentian Mountains northwest of Montreal. Richardson was treated initially at the Centre Hospitalier Laurentien near the resort before being transferred first to Montreal's Sacre Coeur hospital and from there to an unspecified specialist hospital.