Biography

QUICK BIO

Full Name: Helen Elizabeth McCrory
Date of Birth: 17 August 1968
Astrological Sign: Leo
Place of Birth: Paddington, England, UK
Parents: Anne Morgans and Iain McCrory
Siblings: Catherine McCrory and Jon McCrory
Ancestry: English, Scottish, and Welsh
Languages: English
Education: Queenswood Boarding School; Drama Centre London
Height: 5’4″
Avocation: A dirty, dirty vodka martini; dancing; music
Music Interests: Bob Dylan, Jazz
Quote: “What I find most interesting about acting is transforming myself.”

EARLY LIFE AND CAREER
Helen was born in Paddington in England, UK. Her mother, Anne (née Morgans), is Welsh and her father, Iain McCrory (born 29 March 1940), is a diplomat from Glasgow; they married in 1974. She is the eldest of three children. She was educated at Queenswood School near Hatfield, Hertfordshire, and then spent a year living in Italy. Upon her return to Britain, she began studying acting at the Drama Centre in London.

She began her career on stage in the UK. She won the Manchester Evening News’ Best Actress Award for her performance in the National Theatre’s Blood Wedding and the Ian Charleson award for classical acting for playing Rose Trelawney in Trelawney of the Wells. Helen’s theatre work has continued to win her critical praise and a large fan base through such work as the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Les Enfant du Paradis opposite Joseph Fiennes, Rupert Graves and James Purefoy. At the Almeida Theatre, her productions have included The Triumph of Love opposite Chiwetel Ejiofor and the radical verse production, Five Gold Rings, opposite Damian Lewis.

Helen has also worked extensively at the Donmar Warehouse playing lead roles in How I Learnt to Drive, Old Times directed by Roger Michel, and in Sam Mendes’ farewell double bill of Twelfth Night and Uncle Vanya (a triumph in both London and New York). For her performance in Twelfth Night, Helen was nominated for the Evening Standard Best Actress Award, and the New York Drama Desk Awards.

In the 2010 production of The Late Middle Classes, Variety wrote of Helen’s performance as Celia, “Deliciously brittle. McCrory goes to town with Celia’s boredom, her seemingly artless physicality as artfully contrived as her drop-dead diction. She seizes the potential of Leveaux’s measured pacing, filling the stage time — often hilariously — with her character’s needs. Armed with Gray’s compassion, she makes Celia simultaneously selfish and sympathetic.”

In 2013 Helen received an Olivier nomination for her portrayal as Libby in The Last of the Haussmans. Broadway World critic wrote, “No one who saw it can forget the ferocity with which she tore into the hippie mum.”

Helen delivered a majestic performance as the vengeful protagonist in Carrie Cracknel’s 2014 Medea, which earned her rave reviews. One critic wrote, “Helen McCrory is at the peak of her power. She is a marvellous Medea. When she first enters in combat trousers, scrubbing at her teeth as if they were enemies, her voice is deep and guttural. Each syllable seems to have been wrenched from her insides.” Another critic wrote, “She excelled in this modern-dress take on Euripides that is alive with complexity and psychological astuteness.” Evening Standard wrote, “McCrory is on exceptional form.” Helen won the London Critics Circle Theatre Best Actress Award for Medea.

Helen’s 2016 portrayal of the palpable Hester Collyer in The Deep Blue Sea was touted as a shining performance, blazing in the passionate revival. One critic wrote, “I’ve seen many fine Hesters but few who have conveyed so clearly what Shakespeare called “the very wrath of love.”

On the small screen, Helen’s first television film, Karl Francis’ Screen Two: Streetlife (1995) with Rhys Ifans, won her the Welsh BAFTA, Monte Carlo Best Actress Award and the Royal Television Society’s Best Actress Award, for her extraordinary performance as Jo. The Edinburgh Film Festival wrote “simply the best performance this year”.

She went on to win Critics Circle Best Actress Award for her role as the barrister Rose Fitzgerald in the Channel 4 series North Square (2000), having been previously nominated for her performance in The Fragile Heart (1996). Helen has shown her diversity as an actress, appearing in comedies such as Lucky Jim (2003) with Stephen Tompkinson or Dead Gorgeous (2002) with Fay Ripley, as well as dramas such as Joe Wright’s The Last King (2003) (for which she was nominated for the LA Television Awards) and Anna Karenina (2000).

Helen is renowned on screen as the formidable Aunt Polly in five seasons of the television series Peaky Blinders. As writer, creator and executive producer Steven Knight wrote, “Helen McCrory was both the sovereign and the maid, regal and rebellious in the same minute. There was a look she had that pinned the object of gaze to the wall, amused and aloof and time-stopping. It was a look she used to frame the character of Polly Gray, from 2013-2019. Her first moment as Polly on screen shattered all preconceptions of what a woman of her age living in those times should look like and act like.” Knight continues, “The Peaky Blinders audience is very selective, very particular, and to be taken to their hearts is a real achievement. People can spot the real thing, and that is what Helen was. On screen, that is what Helen McCrory is.”

Her most recent television roles in Roadkill (2020), Quiz (2020), MotherFatherSon (2019), and Fearless (2017) garnered her equal praise.

Helen passed away on April 16, 2021 after a battle with cancer, age 52. May she rest in peace.

PERSONAL AND FAMILY LIFE

On 4 July 2007, Helen married actor Damian Lewis. They have a daughter, Manon (b. 8 September 2006), and a son, Gulliver (b. 2 November 2007). They have homes in Tufnell Park in North London, and near Sudbury, Suffolk.

She is an Ambassador for The Prince’s Trust charitable organization, an honorary patron of the London children’s charity Scene & Heard, and Patron of the Sir Hubert von Herkomer Arts Foundation since its conception in 2013. In honour of her memory, the HvH Arts Foundation introduced the “McCrory Award,” which will be dedicated to supporting gifted children from disadvantaged families who do not have access to the resources, training and income to fulfill their creative arts potential.

During the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, she and husband Damian Lewis launched the FeedNHS campaign, a program that provides food from high street restaurants to NHS staff, and had raised £1 million for the charity by early April of that year. The initiative started in London, but following its success plans it was announced to roll it out to other cities in the UK.

Helen was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2017 Queen’s New Years Honours for services to drama.

FUN TRIVIA
1. During her childhood she lived in Africa and Paris, and went to an English boarding school. She grew up in Norway, Nigeria, Cameroon, Tanzania, Zanzibar, Madagascar and Paris, among other places.
2. Daughter of a diplomat and a physiotherapist.
3. Her father is from Glasgow, Scotland and her mother is from Wales.
4. She originally couldn’t take the role of Bellatrix Lestrange in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007) due to pregnancy and was replaced by Helena Bonham Carter. She was then cast as Narcissa Malfoy, Bellatrix’s sister, in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009).
5. She and her husband Damian Lewis have portrayed real-life couple, Cherie Blair and Tony Blair on television movies. Lewis in Confessions of a Diary Secretary (2007) and McCrory in The Special Relationship (2010).
6. Quoted as saying she was a real “art freak” when she was a teenager.
7. Helen and her husband Damian have worked together and/or collaborated on projects such as the film Bill, the play Five Gold Rings, and the short Normal for Norfolk in which Damian produced and his brother Gareth Lewis wrote and directed.
8. One of her favorite foods: artichokes
9. She could sleep anywhere, even napping for four minutes off stage during the interval of a play.
10. She used her awards as doorstops. Others were in the office or in little cubbyholes in their library – “they go between the books, because they actually look like arty pieces.”

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