helenistic, Author at Helen McCrory

Helen McCrory: A Class Act

On October 2, 2014April 13, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

On-stage romance, rude reviews and skinny-dipping with Damian Lewis

by Craig McLean | October 2, 2014 | The Evening Standard

Velvet dress, £805, A.W.A.K.E. at brownsfashion.com. Gianvito Rossi boots, £730 (020 7499 9133)

The tiny dynamo that is Helen McCrory, who’s twice played Cherie Blair, was a forthright politician in Skyfall and served three times in the Harry Potter films as the malevolent Narcissa Malfoy, is perched just so on a sofa at The Ivy, a big heat patch plastered wonkily on her neck. ‘I hurt it doing Medea,’ she explains. During the rapturously received staging of Euripides’ tragedy at the National, McCrory’s character was required to faint. But one night she hit another actor as she fell, ending up semi-concussed. ‘I went from ranting Greek bitch to Orphan Annie in about one beat,’ she says self-mockingly. But with a long career on stage behind her — among other accolades, she was nominated for an Evening Standard award for the Donmar’s 2002 pro-duction of Uncle Vanya — McCrory knew that the show had to go on. ‘It added a frisson to the evening. Everyone was a bit more interested in my acting after that,’ she hoots.

She’s also the leading lady of the BBC’s Peaky Blinders, the second series of which started last night. The super-stylised gangster drama — violence straight out of Al Capone’s Chicago, fashions and haircuts out of hipster Dalston — is ‘tongue-in-cheek’, as McCrory puts it. But where the first series, quoting creator and writer Steven Knight, was all about opium, this season’s drug is cocaine. ‘One is a sedative, woozy, decadent… Whereas coke is a skanky, speedy, nasty, sweaty, anxious drug that makes everyone think they’re really interesting,’ she says with a sardonic smile. The reason for this narcotic change of pace is, naturally, London. Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy) wants to expand the Peaky Blinders’ illegal gambling operation from the Midlands to the capital. ‘This year we see the fragility of all the characters. The cracks are beginning to show as they get out of their comfort zone; as they come down to London.’ The cracks are showing for McCrory’s Aunt Polly, too: in the opening episode we saw her character shifting from hard-as-nails matriarch of the Birmingham razor gang led by Shelby to hard-as-nails matriarch unmoored by the loss of her children.

Continue reading Helen McCrory: A Class Act

Interviews Peaky Blinders Print Media

Helen McCrory: Aunt Polly Returns

On September 30, 2014April 13, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

BBC Period Drama Peaky Blinders is Back

by Scarlett Kilcooley-O’Halloran | September 30, 2014 | British Vogue

ACTRESS Helen McCrory is well-versed in the virtues of the wardrobe department. With an award-winning career that has spanned over 20 years, she has played Shakespearian queens, ancient Greek protagonists, and a Harry Potter witch to name but a few mesmerising roles, but it is her latest role that is capturing her sartorial imagination right now.

Returning as the strong-willed Aunt Polly in the BBC period drama Peaky Blinders (the story of a family of gangsters running the Birmingham underground scene) for a second series, McCrory has – not for the first time – found her outfits central to how she has been able to develop her character.

The great advantage of wearing Dior or Marchesa is that it’s all been taken care of by people that know more about clothes than you do

Continue reading Helen McCrory: Aunt Polly Returns

Interviews Peaky Blinders Print Media

Helen McCrory exclusive interview – Peaky Blinders

On September 29, 2014April 14, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Daniel Falconer | 29 September 2014 | Female First

With the second series of fantastic BBC Two drama Peaky Blinders just around the corner, we couldn’t resist catching up with Helen McCrory – who plays Aunt Polly – to find out just what we can expect from the show and her character going forward.

Going back to before series one, what initially drew you to the role of Aunt Polly in Peaky Blinders?

Well I was sent the scripts in the traditional way, they came through the post, and Otto Bathurst phoned me up who I’d worked with before and said: ‘There’s a part I’d like you to have a look at’, and I was just fascinated in this world. I didn’t think that I’d seen it on British television before. I thought that we’re known in Britain to do our television histories, but they tend to be of the upper classes or Upstairs, Downstairs set in London, in a white stucco house crescent and to see a whole world that was now set in working class, criminal streets of Birmingham, with men coming back from the First World War, and the impact of war on them, the impact of communism, the impact of women suddenly working at home and working out of the home and having to hand it back to the men was just a fascinating part of our own history, that we are still reeling from now and picking up the consequences from. So, I said ‘yes’, and then on top of that, Otto talked to me about the way that he wanted to film it – was much more in the world of John Ford and the Westerns, and instead of doing British gritty realism, to make it look cinematic and to have fun with it, and we’ve continued that into the second series – these huge epic landscapes and, this idea of Wild West, still prevails as a tone.

Continue reading Helen McCrory exclusive interview – Peaky Blinders

Peaky Blinders Trailer Video