It is something when the death of an actress known for her stage performances in Ibsen, Chekhov and a musical derived from a novel by Christopher Isherwood, can knock Jade Goody off the front pages of The Sun and The Mirror.

The universal resonance of the Natasha Richardson story lies particularly in the dramatic timeline and unbelievable circumstances. Here is a beautiful woman larking about on a fashionable ski slope. Within hours she has lost consciousness and surgeons are fighting hopelessly to save her life. There are shades of Princess Diana's last journey: the hard-to-believe fact of her death, the endless 'what ifs'.

Like Diana, Natasha Richardson was the mother of two boys, the younger the same age as Harry when he heard of the fatal car crash. As with Diana, Natasha was part of a famous dynasty and there was a kind of protocol in the decision to fly her brain-dead body back to New York, so that she could lie in state in a hospital bed while family members came to pay their final respects. There was something of a royal sense of obligation within Liam Neeson and Vanessa Redgrave, raw and swollen in grief, moving among the acting fraternity of Broadway.

The main protagonists in this drama were photographed in bright city lights of evening. They had the jagged look of those stunned by the unreality of their situation. Neeson in layers of T-shirts and jerseys and jackets which he might have been wearing since he was called away from a film set with the news that his wife had suffered a skiing accident.

Vanessa Redgrave, almost sleepwalking with grief from the hospital, a scarf that she had been wearing round her head now draped round her neck.

The saddest sartorial descriptive detail was that Natasha's elder son, Micheal, aged 13, had been spotted still wearing his Mont Tremblant skiing sweatshirt. He had been with his mother the whole time.

The power of the story was that it involved the death not just of an actress but of a mother. The thousands of posted internet comments were gut responses to the cruelty of this. On Mother's Day, one is struck by the sadness of two boys "never able to say the word mummy again" and of a bereaved mother, Vanessa Redgrave, singing a lullaby to her dead daughter in the clinical silence of a hospital room.

Newspapers have talked of the curse of the Redgraves. I cannot see a curse, only eventful lives of an unusual family. Natasha is said to have moved to New York to escape the burden of being a Redgrave, but she probably would have gone there anyway. It is a city which suits quick-witted, outward-looking European women.

One of the most examined aspects of the story is the account from the Mont Tremblant ski resort, including the fateful decision to turn away the ambulance. I can absolutely see it. Natasha not wanting to make a fuss, being slightly embarrassed, looking forward to the end of her lesson when she could see her sons again.

Vanessa Redgrave told an interviewer days before the accident that Natasha didn't much like skiing and she could not understand why she was there. I bet it was for her sons. She wanted them to have a good time and if they were happy, she would be too. It was purest maternal instinct.

It is somehow more moving that Natasha was not a champion skier. Natasha was a laughing, self-conscious mother on the beginner slopes. Her fall could have been an amusing photograph. Her sons might have rolled their eyes and mouthed at her 'Muuuum'. She died at her most motherly.

Prince William singled out Mother's Day as the occasion marked for him by a feeling of "emptiness".

He mourns his mother as Natasha's sons will grieve for her. To them, she will always be the best mother in the world.

The final accessibility of Natasha's story is that everyone has thought again about their own families. In remembering Natasha, this Mother's Day, we are also praying for ourselves. As Joan Rivers puts it: "Anyone who doesn't get up in the morning and say 'How lucky I am' is an idiot."