Yes, yes, we know all about Tom Cruise, Isaac Hayes and Scientology, but how about this, from an interview with Vanessa Redgrave in today’s Observer: “Vanessa was always on the Left, but the point at which she disappeared into the extreme Left was in 1973 when she joined Gerry Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party. Corin [her brother] had joined two years before, but she resisted until a wave of London car bombings convinced her that ‘the British military dictatorship’ was performing acts of provocation…She met Gerry Healy…and travelled with him to meetings: ‘The next few weeks were among the most exhilarating of my life. It seemed to me that I learned more in that short space of time than in the whole of my previous existence.’ Healy was delighted with his new convert and got her to buy a house in the Peak District to turn into a ‘college of Marxism’. According to later defectors, the Red House was run almost like a prison – guards patrolled the perimeter and students were not allowed contact with their families or the outside world, for fear of MI5 infiltration. Naturally, the press were suspicious and in 1978 police raided the house on a tip-off from The Observer that it contained a stockpile of arms. No arms were found and Vanessa and Corin sued The Observer for libel but lost and were left with huge costs. Then, in 1985, the tabloids mounted a huge expose of Gerry Healy based on testimony from defectors – he had sexually abused dozens of women and stolen party funds. Almost all the party members then left – except the Redgraves, who stayed loyal to Healy till his death in 1989…She writes unrepentantly in her 1991 autobiography: ‘I can truthfully say that I remain absolutely convinced of the necessity of Marxism and that not for a single day has my conviction been shaken. On the contrary, it has grown deeper with experience and the passing of time. That this should be so I ascribe not to my own resoluteness and determination – though I think I can show those qualities when the occasion demands – but to the training and education I received from the party I joined, and from the man who led it for almost all those years, Gerry Healy.’

Blimey.

And interesting too as another piece of evidence of the way that the urge to believe is hot-wired in so many people (Derb’s written plenty on this), and, yes, of the continuing appeal of the absolute. Something doesn’t have to be called to be a religion to be one.

But, still, fair’s fair, as Vanessa Redgrave reminded us all recently in Nip/Tuck (TV’s most entertaining soap, but that’s another discussion), when she wants to be, she’s a great actress…

Hat-tip Harry, who has some useful reminders about the Workers Revolutionary Party, Iraq and money.