Categories Damian Lewis Fearless Interviews Print Media Their Finest

Helen McCrory on her marriage to Damian Lewis: “He’s never given me reason to be jealous”

A Thoroughly Modern Marriage

by Elizabeth Day | Stella Magazine | April 1, 2017

Helen McCrory arrives hungry. We’re meeting  on a spring afternoon in  a pub around the corner from her north London home, and Helen hasn’t yet eaten. She’s got a couple of hours before  she has to pick up her children – Manon, 10, and Gulliver, nine – from school, and she fully intends to make the most of them.

‘Are you sure this is all right?’ she asks  as she orders the soup of the day. ‘I mean, really? OK, well, I think I’ll have the lamb as a main… I’ll come back for pudding.’

We sit outside. Helen is tiny: slender and upright with the poise of a ballerina. She is also wildly entertaining. At 48, she is one of those women whose face is accentuated by faint wrinkles rather than oppressed by them – and she couldn’t care less anyway, given that she is constantly in work. Actresses over 35 are routinely asked if they’re concerned about the lack of roles for ‘older women’. When I raise this, Helen deadpans, ‘Well, I hope they find work.’

For her, it’s never been a problem. She finds vanity and self-regard boring. Recently, she took on the part of Elizabeth I for the children’s TV series Horrible Histories,  and ‘I begged the director to let me have  a bald cap, a pockmarked face and blackened teeth. And he was like, “But we could make her look so beautiful.” I said, “Yeah, but where’s the fun in that?”

‘Ageing hasn’t changed that much for me because it’s never been, “Elle Macpherson’s not available, let’s get McCrory!”’

Helen is more interested in characters ‘if they’re different from me. That’s what I enjoy most about the job.’ Her career has been both impressive and varied – from big-budget box-office catnip (Narcissa Malfoy  in the Harry Potter films) to small-screen critical acclaim (Aunt Polly in Peaky Blinders) to dazzling stage performances (her electrifying 2014 turn as Medea won her a Critics’ Circle Theatre Award for Best Actress).

Continue reading Helen McCrory on her marriage to Damian Lewis: “He’s never given me reason to be jealous”

Categories Damian Lewis Events Fashion and Style Screenings

Damian Lewis and Helen McCrory Attend Franca Screening and Anna Wintour’s Dinner Celebration

by Gingersnap | November 18, 2016 | damian-lewis.com

Source: Instagram @millermode

Damian and Helen attended Vogue Magazine’s screening of Franca: Chaos and Creation at the new Metrograph theater in Manhattan. The documentary is an intimate portrait of Franca Sozzani, the legendary editor-in-chief of Italian Vogue.

Capping off the evening the couple attended the screening after party, a private dinner celebration hosted by Anna Wintour at her home.

Source: Vogue

Categories Interviews Print Media The Deep Blue Sea

‘Heart in her mouth’: Helen McCrory brings compassion to a tragic role in The Deep Blue Sea

Helen McCrory’s Hester in The Deep Blue Sea

Peter Craven | September 29, 2016 | Sydney Morning Herald

Helen McCrory​ is at 48 one of the big-time actresses of the British stage, a classical actor who can burn up the stage in modern roles as well. You might have seen her as Cherie Blair with Helen Mirren in The Queen or as Narcissa Malfoy in the Harry Potter films, or on TV in Peaky Blinders.

In 2005 I saw her in the West End in what is arguably Shakespeare’s greatest comic role for a woman, Rosalind in As You Like It to Dominic West’s Orlando. McCrory’s voice was deep velvet and her wit razor sharp, a Rosalind for the ages.

Helen McCrory in The Deep Blue Sea.Helen McCrory in The Deep Blue Sea.CREDIT:RICHARD HUBERT SMITH

National Theatre live broadcasts have shown her in The Last of the Haussmans with Julie Walters, and as a riveting Medea. Now she’s doing a modern classic, Terence Rattigan’s​ The Deep Blue Sea.

“I worked with [Harold] Pinter on Old Times and when I asked him who his favourite modern playwright was he said Rattigan,” McCrory says. “How bizarre, I thought – how deeply bizarre. Surely they couldn’t be further apart in content and style?” Pinter with his menacing pauses, his uncanny ear for dark implications.

Continue reading ‘Heart in her mouth’: Helen McCrory brings compassion to a tragic role in The Deep Blue Sea

Categories Print Media Reviews The Deep Blue Sea

The Deep Blue Sea Review: Helen McCrory blazes in passionate revival

Terence Rattigan’s powerful portrait of emotional turmoil in postwar Britain is beautifully played – if only the sound effects weren’t so disruptive

Michael Billington | June 9, 2016 | The Guardian

Intemperate feelings … Tom Burke and Helen McCrory in The Deep Blue Sea.
Intemperate feelings … Tom Burke and Helen McCrory in The Deep Blue Sea. Photograph: Richard Hubert Smith

Terence Rattigan’s best play has been long overdue for revival at the National. Fortunately, it gets an impassioned production by Carrie Cracknell that illuminates Rattigan’s psychological understanding and boasts a shining performance from Helen McCrory. Its only blemish is an intrusive sound score that suggests the characters are living not in west London in the 1950s but on the edge of Krakatoa during its eruption in the 1880s.

On a happier note, Tom Scutt’s design follows the example of the 1993 Almeida revival in creating a grey-green apartment block, with transparent walls, that reminds us that Rattigan’s play offers us a microcosm of 1950s England. The focus is palpably on Hester Collyer, a judge’s wife who has sacrificed ease and comfort to live with Freddie Page, a boyish war hero who cannot meet her emotional needs and who has no place in the modern world.

Continue reading The Deep Blue Sea Review: Helen McCrory blazes in passionate revival