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
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.
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.
Michael Billington | June 9, 2016 | The Guardian
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
by Paul Taylor | June 9, 2016 | The Independent
Helen McCrory and director Carrie Cracknell won awards for their striking collaboration on Medea. They resume their partnership, with more mixed results, in this revival of Terence Rattigan’s 1952 masterpiece.
You need an actress with the range to tackle the tragic extremities of Euripides and Racine if you seek to sound the depths of Hester Collyer, one of the great female roles of the postwar repertoire. The play may unfold in a dingy Ladbroke Grove rooming house, but it focuses on a woman who is a Fifties equivalent of Phedre, flouting convention in her obsessive infatuation with a man who cannot match the intensity of her feelings. One-sided passion, unequal love: it’s Rattigan’s abiding theme, explored here with matchless insight in a play that was inspired by the suicide of one of the playwright’s former male lovers.
by Henry Hitchings | June 9, 2016 | Evening Standard
Her character Hester Collyer is besotted with a man who is incapable of reciprocating her seriousness. When we first see her she’s flat out in front of an unlit gas fire, having failed to kill herself. Throughout the two and a half hours that follow, we suspect another suicide attempt is imminent.
Her lover Freddie is a drunk whose distinguished career in the RAF has given way to a diet of golf and sketchy business meetings. Tom Burke captures the caddish manner of a fallen idol who has slumped into emotional and professional laziness. He’s cruelly insensitive — but retains a faint hint of likeability that makes his callousness feel especially sad.