Helen McCrory Comes Home for Harry Potter

Helen McCrory is puffing away on a roll-up outside the Charlotte Street Hotel, in Fitzrovia, concentrating intensely on a new role. “I am not,” she tells herself sternly, “only a mother.” The trouble is that for the past year, motherhood is the only part the actress has played, attending to the serious business of taking ladybirds off leaves, then putting them back again, with her two tiny children. The glamorous location was a house by the ocean in Santa Monica, where the contented stay-at-home wife of Damian Lewis (who was working on Life, an NBC cop series) settled almost too easily into the pattern of strolling with her babies down to the sea every morning in “just a pair of knickers” (the kids, not their mother).

She was amazed by the relentless work ethic around her: Damian’s 80-hour weeks of filming, the stream of cars on the six-lane freeway every morning, heading off to serve the Yankee dollar. “And people there never complain,” she says, pouring our tea with vicarage aplomb. “It’s always about the beautiful day, never ‘Oh f***, I’ve laddered my tights!’ Everyone you meet in the playground has had the teeth done, the skin done, the hair done…”

When the family came home, it was a huge relief; one imagines especially for McCrory, who grew up in Africa, Scandinavia and France, and had never felt so alien as she did in the superficial and sexualised mayhem of Tinseltown. “My two-year-old daughter was asked to put on a bikini top on the beach. How weird is that?” Today, McCrory, 40, shows no sign of an LA make­over: she is untweaked, scrub-faced, wearing black chiffon, leggings and – to hide her hair, she says, but also because she indulges her boho side – a fine bowler hat. She is as skinny as a schoolgirl, a slenderness that has more to do with metabolism than self-denial (she is almost peculiarly without vanity), and is slightly bemused to find herself back in business, promoting her new movie, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which was filmed before she retreated to the beach.

They rented the film-maker Nick Broomfield’s house. It once belonged to Jane Fonda, and had seen a stream of starry rentals, including Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke, whose stray Christmas cards McCrory mischievously displayed. “Everyone said, ‘God, you know so many people’, and I was like, ‘Mmm… we do.'” She laughs. “Come on! Ethan doesn’t care that Greenpeace sent him a picture that year.” She told nobody there she was an actress, embarrassed to make the claim in a town where actor friends of hers were stopped for speeding and handed CVs and head shots by hopeful traffic cops. At least, she never felt LA was the centre of her professional world. “Theatre doesn’t exist there,” she says flatly. “There is no respect for it. If you are in a show, it’s totally acceptable to drop out because you’ve been offered an advert. I told Damian he ought to start up a theatre company there, but when I thought about it, I realised I’m not interested in re-educating audiences where people are having pizzas delivered. I mean, can you imagine being on stage with ‘I am a seagull’ – and suddenly there’s a cry of ‘Pepperoni for row B!’?”

She was persuaded, however, to make six guest appearances in Life, playing a sophisticated security expert – “very Veronica Lake, all cigarettes and stockings” – and being amused by the horror of the set as she routinely cheeked and abused its star. “I’m sure they kept thinking, ‘Who is this bloody rude woman?’ But Damian and I take the piss out of each other all the time.” The couple met in 2004, playing lovers in Joanna Laurens’s Five Gold Rings at the Almeida, but she has never seen his best-known performances in Band of Brothers or The Forsyte Saga. “And he’s never seen any of my stuff.” She shrugs. “Neither of us minds.” In LA, as her husband became a network star, McCrory missed not just European indolence and family shindigs, but British actors. She makes life at Hogwarts sound like a gala evening for Thespians Reunited: Alan Rickman, Jim Broadbent, Michael Gambon (with whom she made her television debut in 1993, in The Entertainer) and her hero, Tim Spall, required to do nothing more than hobble down a corridor and open a door. “You think, ‘What a waste’, but it’s ideal casting, because it doesn’t matter how good your Hamlet is if the soldier at the back’s not concentrating.” Cinched and squeezed in sexy couture, she plays the mean beauty Narcissa Malfoy, a role she chose not because she wanted to pick up a wand for her kids, but because she was “blown away” by Potter director David Yates’s sex-trade drama, Sex Traffic. “I know,” she laughs. “Maybe an unusual reason.”

McCrory is too irreverent to be earnest, even about her art; given the chance, she is a good-time girl, infectiously funny and – before having her children, Manon, two, and one-year-old Gulliver – the one in the pub cracking jokes with a pint of Guinness. The night her friend Daniel Craig was cast as 007, she bumped into him while dining with her dad at the Wolseley restaurant, and they all piled into a rickshaw to Chinatown to cele­brate. She makes it all sound fabulous, but actually she would hate the global celebrity and media scrutiny Craig is contracted to welcome as Bond (a role for which her super-smooth beloved was once considered). Was she surprised that the publicity-wary Craig accepted the part? She smiles: “What young man is not going to do it?” Privately – you just know – she feels for him.

The idea of acting to accrue a fortune quietly appalls her; she is a purist at heart, passionate, serious, without much of a protective veneer and with nothing like the Old Etonian confidence of her husband. Moreover, there is something foreign about her, not quite rooted in the class snobbery and petty jealousies of England.

“I went from countries where we had servants to the local school in Bletchley,” she says. “I’m just as happy to eat foie gras as a baked potato. I don’t see those differences. I have no ambition for things and fame. Because of my father’s job, I saw highly responsible people running countries, and I saw that publicity held them back, created unhappiness in the family, a stumbling block within relationships. It was never something I wanted. I don’t understand that desire. Some actors like universal love, rather than just being loved by one person in the quietness of the house, which is what I’ve always been interested in.”

The daughter of a Foreign Office diplomat, McCrory had a peripatetic childhood, covering Cameroon, Tanzania, Scandinavia, Paris – where she read Zola and smoked Gitanes in cafes as a teenager. In some ways, she has remained that young woman, with her odd mixture of sophistication and innocence. It was Africa that touched her most, where village children were more excited by the arrival of a bicycle than by pin-ups, a sense of priorities she seeks to instil in her own children. Both are sponsoring African children in Rwanda and Tanzania (“I write the letters at the moment”), and are encouraged to count their blessings. “We dig a big hole in the garden, and I say, ‘Just imagine if that was how you had to get your water.’ They have one pair of shoes, and when they grow out of them, they get the next pair.”

McCrory trained at the Drama Centre, with its emphasis on character analysis and psychology, where the criticism was harsh but, she believes, vital in a business based on rejection. Not that she has suffered much of it. Richard Eyre cast her as the late Victorian actress Trelawny of the Wells as soon as she graduated, for which she won the Ian Charleson award for classical acting. Did her tough training and early success give her confidence? “My acting hasn’t got anything to do with confidence,” she replies. “I did a reading last night of Auden for the British Library, and I found it terrifying. I can walk across a stage in a pair of suspenders… because it’s not me. Real confidence is standing up as yourself.”

McCrory has done 16 years’ worth of television and films – Anna Karenina, Lucky Jim, Enduring Love – but she is innately a creature of the British theatre, her career measured out in Cherry Orchards and Seagulls, accolades for Shakespeare, Pinter and, especially, Chekhov. To perfect her characterisation, she researches, visiting art galleries to study portraits for clues to conveying emotion, the way a head was turned, an eyebrow arched, an eye line held steady. “How you make these little portraits with subtle changes to the body can communicate so much.”

At times, art has mirrored life rather too convincingly. When her son was four months old, McCrory went back to work in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, returning from the Almeida to feed him, rising in the middle of the night and the early hours. “I was exhausted. At the end of the play, my character commits suicide, and the audience really knew why! They were like, ‘Ooh, bless – death is going to be such a relief for that poor dear.’ I had to dye my hair blonde for it, and a friend thought it was just the stress of everything that had made me go grey overnight.”

She has always been careful about her choices, turning down offers to play real people for fear of upsetting them or their families. In the screenwriter Peter Morgan’s The Queen, however, she played Cherie Blair, a role she will reprise in The Special Relationship, his story of the friendship between the Clintons and the Blairs, launched at the Pont de la Tour restaurant and enfolding the drama of the Lewinsky affair. She met Mrs B once, briefly, and has no inclination to seek her out for research purposes. “Damian tells me I should meet her properly. The problem is, if you’ve met somebody, you have a responsibility to them. I don’t think it’s fair to ask her about Stormont, or Kosovo, or Matrix Chambers… then it not be in the film. At the end of the day, it’s not my Cherie Blair, it’s Peter Morgan’s Cherie Blair.”

Right now, McCrory is the actor’s actor lacking a play. She has taken to compiling a wish list of parts, sitting in the drama section of Foyles bookstore, noting what has been ignored for years or never staged. Mostly, she’s focused on the ostracised writers of the McCarthy era, with their liberal politics and meaty parts for sassy dames, especially the blacklisted Abraham Polonsky’s film noir Force of Evil, which she would love to see adapted for the stage. She also fancies appearing on Broadway in a fast-paced comedy and has discussed starring in Much Ado opposite her husband. Right now, though, the main ambition is decidedly domestic: “I’d just like to get through a summer,” she smiles, “without being up the duff.”

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince opens on Wednesday