Versatile and charismatic actor of leading stage roles
Helen’s McCrory’s death from cancer at the age of 52 has robbed British theatre and television of a remarkably versatile and charismatic actor and one of the great leading ladies of her generation.
In recent years, she had gained a cult following on screen as the ruthless Narcissa Malfoy in the final trilogy of the hugely successful Harry Potter film franchise, and as steely matriarch of the Shelby family, Aunt Polly, in five series of the BBC Television hit Peaky Blinders.
On stage, she performed with the National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company, at the Almeida and Donmar Warehouse, and in the West End. She was twice nominated for Olivier awards, winning a Critics’ Circle award for her punkish, feisty Medea at the NT in 2014.
Born in Paddington, London, she spent her early years in Africa with her Glaswegian working-class-born diplomat father before training at the Drama Centre. She graduated in 1990 to make her professional debut as Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest at Harrogate Theatre, and as one of the Weird Sisters to Roy Marsden’s Macbeth at the Riverside Studios in London.
The following year, she was seen in the National Theatre education department’s schools tour of Federico García Lorca’s Blood Wedding, joining the main company to travel to Seville with Fuente Ovejuna for the 1992 Expo.
McCrory continued to catch attention as Nina opposite Judi Dench’s Arkadina in The Seagull and as Judith in Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple at the National in 1994.
In the Tricycle Theatre’s first Shakespeare production in 1995, she was a confidently centred and surly wife to Lennie James’ Macbeth, vividly returning to the role in voice only for the Little Angel Theatre’s puppet presentation in 2013.
Joining the RSC in 1996, McCrory clearly relished the mysterious Garance in the Simon Callow-adapted and directed staging of Les Enfants du Paradis at the Barbican. The same year she won Royal Television Society and BAFTA Cymru awards as a single mother dealing with abortion in Karl Francis’ Streetlife.
At the Donmar Warehouse, she was a God-fearing, Bible-clutching North Belfast Protestant in Gary Mitchell’s stark portrait of a ghetto estate In a Little World of Our Own (1997), and searingly honest as the niece to Kevin Whately’s abusive Uncle in Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive (1998).
As the self-disguising Leonide in Marivaux’s The Triumph of Love, she gave a stellar performance in 1999 at the Almeida, where she returned as Anna alongside future Peaky Blinders co-star Aiden Gillen in David Hare’s adaptation of Chekhov’s Platonov (2000), and as the seducer of her husband-to-be Damian Lewis in Joanna Laurens’ Five Gold Rings (2003). Later, director Michael Attenborough remembered that the electricity between them was “like directing a fire”. The couple had been planning a reunion on stage at the time of McCrory’s death.
Back at the Donmar, she was a languidly sullen Yelena to Simon Russell-Beale’s Uncle Vanya (2002) and an impeccable Anna in Pinter’s Old Times (2004), and in 2005 received her first Olivier nomination as Rosalind in As You Like It, directed by David Lan, at Wyndham’s Theatre. A second came for Stephen Beresford’s The Last of the Haussmans at the National in 2012. Sharing the stage with Julie Walters and Rory Kinnear, it was McCrory, Michael Billington noted in the Guardian, “who really carries the evening”.
Tom Burke and Helen McCrory in The Deep Blue Sea at the National Theatre in 2016. Photo: Tristram KentonFeatured in The Stage 100 round-up of the industry’s most influential figures in 2006, she was an intense Rebecca in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm at the Almeida in 2008 and RTS and WhatsOnStage awards-nominated for Simon Gray’s The Late Middle Classes at the Donmar in 2010.
Her stage swansong was a much-admired desperate and desolate Hester in Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea at the National in 2016.
On screen, she was never less than notable, “stealing every scene she is in”, as The Stage noted of her smouldering manipulation of Rufus Sewell’s titular Charles II: The Power and the Passion in 2003. An anguished mother dealing with the death of a child in Spoonface Steinberg (1998), she was mesmerizing as Anna Karenina and award-winning in legal drama North Square (2000), painfully vulnerable as a mariticidal wife in Dead Gorgeous (2002) and was seen as Cherie Blair, wife of Michael Sheen’s former prime minister Tony Blair, in Stephen Frears’ The Queen (2006).
Her last television job was voicing the snow leopard daemon Stelmaria in His Dark Materials from 2019 to 2020.
On film, she was memorable in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011), Sam Mendes’ James Bond debut Skyfall (2012) and the Shakespeare biography, Bill (2015).
Last year, she and husband Lewis launched #FeedNHS, which raised more than £1 million and provided 45,000 meals daily for front-line workers in hospitals around the UK at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Although she claimed to have been physically sick before every performance for the first 10 years of her career, in one of her last interviews she told BBC Radio Four’s Desert Island Discs in 2020: “Theatre makes you want life more than you’re scared of it.”
She was appointed an OBE in 2017.
Helen Elizabeth McCrory was born on August 17, 1968, and died on April 16. She is survived by her husband, Damian Lewis, and their two children.