Author: helenistic

Categories Damian Lewis Interviews Print Media Quiz

Helen McCrory shares her thoughts about love at first sight with husband Damian Lewis

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‘The Secret to a Happy Marriage? Laughter’

by Jack White | Woman’s Weekly | April 11, 2020

We’re delighted to see Helen McCrory back on our screens again.

Last seen as Polly Gray, domineering matriarch of the Shelby family in BBC drama Peaky Blinders, , Helen McCrory claims her ongoing success is down to her ‘searing lack of ambition’.

Now Helen, 51, is to star as Major Charles Ingram’s defence lawyer, Sonia Woodley QC, in ITV’s Quiz – a three-part drama about the infamous Who Wants to be a Millionaire? coughing cheating scandal.

While many of us in 2001 were gripped by the real-life drama surrounding the major and his wife Diana, who allegedly cheated their way to winning £1 million on Chris Tarrant’s TV show, Helen confesses she ‘didn’t really have many memories of the drama at all’.

Continue reading Helen McCrory shares her thoughts about love at first sight with husband Damian Lewis

Categories Interviews Print Media The Deep Blue Sea

Helen McCrory: ‘A good playwright works you like an athlete’

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The actor talks about her part in launching #FeedNHS — and her role in Terence Rattigan’s ‘The Deep Blue Sea’, now streamed by the National Theatre

by Sarah Hamming | Financial Times | July 10, 2020

It’s hard to write about what Helen McCrory got up to during lockdown. Not because it was bad. Quite the reverse, in fact. In March, she and her fellow-actor husband Damian Lewis launched #FeedNHS, a scheme to provide food to front-line workers. By the height of the pandemic, it was serving 45,000 meals daily to 115 hospitals across the country.

No, the trouble is that any write-up that makes this sound remotely saintly would drive her bananas. Frank, funny and down to earth, McCrory, 51, has a fierce aversion to anything pretentious (this is a woman who, on BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs, chose the complete works of Spike Milligan as her luxury book, wrapped in a Bertrand Russell dust jacket “just in case anybody sees me, from another island”).

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Categories Damian Lewis Feed NHS Interviews Personal and Family Life Print Media

Coping With COVID-19 Crisis: Damian Lewis & Helen McCrory

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 On Feeding Health Workers After Filming Halted On ‘Billions’ & ‘Peaky Blinders’

Jake Kenter | April 6, 2020 | Deadline

Damian Lewis Helen McCrory Coping with COVID 19 Crisis

As coronavirus crashed through the TV business, husband and wife Damian Lewis and Helen McCrory were among those cast adrift. Lewis was making Season 5 of Billions, while McCrory was on the brink of going into production on Season 6 of Peaky Blinders. Now, both are holed up in their British countryside home in Suffolk. But far from quietly riding out the COVID-19 tsunami, the pair have leashed an anchor of sorts and are using their platform for a much-needed mission to feed frontline health care workers in the UK.

McCrory said she spent one day doing hair and makeup and tests for Peaky Blinders, during which it dawned on much of the production team that “something very big is coming.” She explains: “The next morning I woke and told my producer I’m not comfortable doing this anymore… Cillian Murphy did the same. Together with the producers, we approached the BBC and said we’re going to pull this now before we have to do this down the line.” Production was halted March 16, a mere three weeks ago. “That all seems like a very different world at the moment. Terribly unimportant,” McCrory reflects.

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Categories Interviews Print Media Quiz

Quiz’s Helen McCrory believes ‘Coughing Major’ Charles Ingram and wife Diana could be innocent in infamous Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? cheating scandal

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Innocent or Guilty?

By Sean O’Grady and Laura Fox | April 5, 2020 | Daily Mail

Helen McCrory has revealed she thinks its possible the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? convicted quiz cheats could be innocent.

The actress, 51, who stars in the show Quiz based on the case, said there are still unanswered questions about Major Charles Ingram who won the show in 2001 after Tecwen Whittock coughed if he said a right answer.

Speaking to The Mirror, Helen said: ‘The fact that a lot of people at the time didn’t hear the cough… Chris Tarrant didn’t hear the cough, the person sitting opposite didn’t hear the cough, people either side didn’t hear the cough, yet for some reason he [Charles Ingram] heard the cough – really?’

Actress McCrory revealed she thinks the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? cheats could be innocent and said there were unanswered questions

While she concedes it could have been a set up, Helen, who plays Sonia Woodley QC, the lawyer who defended the Ingrams’ case, admitted she also thinks its possible Ingram was innocent.

Continue reading Quiz’s Helen McCrory believes ‘Coughing Major’ Charles Ingram and wife Diana could be innocent in infamous Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? cheating scandal