Natasha

Theater and film actress Natasha Richardson suffered a serious brain injury in a Canadian skiing accident and was flown to New York on Tuesday, according to wire service and newspaper reports.

The 45-year-old British performer -- who is married to Liam Neeson and is the daughter of Vanessa Redgrave and the late film director Tony Richardson -- fell on a beginner slope Monday afternoon at Mont Tremblant, a Swiss-style luxury winter resort about 80 miles northwest of Montreal.

The star of the 1998 film "The Parent Trap" and the Tony-winning lead in the 1998 Broadway revival of "Cabaret" apparently was not wearing a helmet at the time of the accident.

"She was accompanied by an experienced ski instructor who immediately called the ski patrol," the resort said in a statement. "She did not show any visible sign of injury but the ski patrol followed strict procedures and brought her back to the bottom of the slope and insisted she should see a doctor."

Mont Tremblant spokeswoman Catherine Lacasse told the Associated Press that Richardson was getting a private lesson and that the actress said she was "fine at first."

"An hour later she said she didn't feel well. She had a headache, so we sent her to the hospital," Lacasse said. "There were no signs of impact and no blood, nothing."

Richardson initially was transported from the resort to the local hospital Centre Hospitalier Laurentien, then was moved to Montreal's Sacre-Coeur hospital. The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. said Richardson left Canada on Tuesday afternoon on a private plane, accompanied by medical staff.

It was not immediately clear if she was accompanied by Neeson, who had been in Toronto filming the movie "Chloe." They are parents to two young boys.

Richardson appears to have what is often called "talk and die syndrome," which is usually due to delayed bleeding from an artery in the brain, according to Dr. Christopher Giza, a neurologist at the UCLA Brain Injury Research Center. Because arterial blood is under high pressure, blood can accumulate rapidly in the brain, pushing the brain to one side and leaking down into the brainstem, where it can "cause a change in mental status, the onset of a coma or, in severe cases, kill the person," he said.

Richardson's publicist did not immediately respond to phone and e-mail messages.