Helen McCrory: A Drama Queen Slays Them with Her Greek Turn

Tickets for Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet may have sold out in record time last week, but Helen McCrory’s Medea is the theatrical event of the moment. Avid theatre-goers who take in both may find the Shakespeare a little pale after McCrory’s “stunning” performance in Euripides’s blood-soaked tale of a woman who wreaks revenge on her faithless husband by killing their children. “It’s the reverse of Hamlet because he spends three hours worrying and does nothing, whereas Medea takes an hour and 15, massacres the whole f****** stage and walks off,” McCrory said before the production opened. “But it’s great because she uses every shred of femininity that she has to do it and she also has the complexity of guilt.”

McCrory added that Medea was “one of the greatest parts you’ll ever play” and the critics seem united in lauding this as her own best performance. Maxie Szalwinska, theatre reviewer for The Sunday Times, said McCrory “ascends to greatness” in the classical role. “She’s one of those actors you can sense has a great performance in them if a director can unlock it. This is McCrory’s,” Szalwinska said.

“She’s extraordinary. It’s almost a female version of Lear. She conveys madness and menace. She can do anything — commanding, fragile, enigmatic — and she has a wonderful voice. She’s beautiful but not quite a beauty. She usually appears as part of an ensemble but I hope this will be the start of her taking centre stage.”

Helen Hawkins, the editor of Culture, will be seeing the play at the National Theatre tomorrow. “I’ve seen Diana Rigg and Fiona Shaw play Medea. It’s Helen McCrory I’m looking forward to,” she said. The production will be broadcast live in cinemas around the world on its closing night, September 4.

McCrory, who turns 46 today, described herself as small but strong with wild hair, like “Janis Joplin crossed with Jimi Hendrix”, and large dark eyes (“as the Spanish say, ‘God put her eyes in with a sooty thumb’”). She is known for her sense of humour, down-to-earth manner and very un-Medea-like devotion to her children, Manon, 7, and Gully (Gulliver),6.

She is married to the actor Damian Lewis, who played marine sergeant Nicholas Brody in the hugely successful American television dramaHomeland. McCrory moved to Los Angeles when she was pregnant with Gully and Lewis was filming the US crime drama series Life, but they have since settled in north London and spoken of “taking turns” to accept work so as not to disrupt their family life. As if to underline that this one is McCrory’s moment, when Lewis took his seat at the National for an early performance of Medea he found himself sitting next to Mary Beard, the Cambridge classicist and television presenter. The academic opened the conversation with him by asking: “What do you do?”

The couple — who will be reading the world’s great love poems together at the Cheltenham literature festival in October — met in 2003 when they appeared in the play Five Gold Rings at the Almeida Theatre in Islington, north London. Lewis proposed in Paris and they married in 2007, the year after Manon was born. “Appallingly, I hadn’t thought about it one jot,” McCrory said last year.

“I never daydreamed as a little girl of getting married and having children. I was as surprised to discover I was getting married as I was to discover I was up the duff. When I fell pregnant, Damian sold his house, I sold mine. We sold his car, moved into a new place, unpacked 87 boxes and went down to St Mary’s [Hospital] Paddington — all in nine months. Oh, plus, I did a job and he did a film and produced it. So we didn’t think about it. I was lucky. I was a healthy woman and enjoyed my pregnancy. I walked around an entire golf course with him two days before I gave birth.”

McCrory is a former diplomat’s daughter who spent her childhood moving from country to country, which might explain how she could take such upheaval in her stride. She was born at St Mary’s, the hospital where she later gave birth, and until the age of four lived in Norway in a flat overlooking a fjord. Her Glaswegian father said she was a regular at diplomatic cocktail parties: “She was a right little social climber . . . she’d climb out of her cot so she could come and talk to all the VIPs from the embassy.”

The family was posted to Africa, first to Cameroon and then Tanzania. The continent “set her free” said her father: “She swam every day, ran around, climbed trees. She was an extremely lively child, agile, well co-ordinated, very clever.” McCrory remembers playing football “all day” with Bahari, their cook’s son, who “walked with a hobbled gait, which meant that when he was dribbling you never knew which way he would go”. She once stole a machete and accidentally cut a beehive in half. She and her younger brother Jonny had to run home with bees chasing them.

The impact of living in Africa has never left her: “I say to my children: don’t throw away that plastic band, you could make a football out of that!” It was a shock to return to Britain aged nine and have to adapt to a Hertfordshire boarding school. “I was confused that children wanted to be adults, to wear make-up and smoke,” she said. “My idea of naughtiness was to go up onto cliffs and practise swallow dives. I had no interest in smoking, boys and hair. I’m a bit like that now.”

McCrory’s parents were shocked when she said she wanted to go to drama school. Her father insisted she get the grades for university so she would have a “plan B”: “I didn’t have a problem with her being an actress, but I hated the idea of her being an out-of-work actress. I needn’t have worried . . . the first time I saw her at the National she had the whole room in tears.”

Aged 25 she won third prize at the Ian Charleson awards for her performance as Rose Trelawny in Trelawny of the Wells at the National. In 2002 she was nominated for an Evening Standard theatre award as best actress for playing Yelena in Uncle Vanya at London’s Donmar Warehouse. She was also nominated for a Laurence Olivier award in 2006 for her portrayal of Rosalind in As You Like It. In 2012 she appeared in The Last of the Haussmanns at the National, whichwas also broadcast live in cinemas round the world.

McCrory has slipped seamlessly between stage and film. She lost the part of Bellatrix Lestrange in the Harry Potter films to Helena Bonham Carter because she was pregnant but later appeared as Lestrange’s sister, Narcissa Malfoy. She appeared in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo and the latest Bond film, Skyfall, and also played Cherie Blair in Stephen Frears’s movie The Queen. When she later bumped into the former prime minister’s wife at a party, Blair gave her a business card.

Earlier this year McCrory and Lewis were No 4 in The Times’s 20 most powerful couples in the arts.They are regularly photographed on the red carpet — “Anyone who says they don’t enjoy going down the red carpet in a fabulous dress just can’t be telling the truth, it’s lovely and very exciting,” she said — and have dined at the White House with the Obamas. “That was very exciting, very thrilling,” recalled McCrory.

“It’s an honour and very interesting — what a great couple, very inspiring. We have met so many different, interesting people, people who have worked hard to get where they are. We really enjoy it.”

Or, as she said recently in more flippant mood: “This year [we’ve] been to the White House, the Golden Globes and the Met ball and I’ve danced until 3am with [Mick] Jagger! I mean, f*** the jet lag!”

Her home life is more prosaic: school runs and weekend trips to the park. She is a “very un-neurotic” mother, she said, because her own parents were un-neurotic, “so my self-worth isn’t tied up in how I look or how much I weigh”.

Although she has hit her mid-forties, she does not worry about work drying up. “Your forties are the most interesting part of your life,” she said recently:

“There’s so much complexity. And dramatists are recognising that now. Friends of mine are burying their parents or lamenting that they didn’t have children or had too many children, worrying about work-life balance. It’s a key point in women’s lives.”

Older women are fabulous, she said: “They don’t dress like people did in the 1950s in age-appropriate cardigans. They have diets and the gym and great clothes.” Earlier this year McCrory was described as “the poster girl for the grown-up woman”. That sounds just about right.

Helen McCrory and Damian Lewis will appear at The Times and Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival on October 12 cheltenhamfestivals.com