Meet the Shelby Family
by BBC | You Tube | September 5, 2013
Categories Peaky Blinders Trailer Video
Author: helenistic
Categories Interviews Peaky Blinders Print Media
Helen McCrory: ‘Move over, darling’
Helen McCrory prefers Chekhov to chick lit and enjoys a stormy marriage to Damian Lewis
You hear Helen McCrory before you see her, which I imagine is often the case, as she is very loud. Hidden behind the door of a bedroom in Claridge’s, she is peeling off a final layer of clothing for Style’s photographer. “Well, it is the end of the day, darling,” comes the boom. “Sod it.” Clever, confident and a little bit camp, McCrory, 45, is considered by many to be the finest actress of her generation — but today she is simply in the mood to hold court and show some skin. Won’t Damian Lewis, her superstar husband, mind her getting her kit off, asks a member of the crew? “No, no, no,” she says. “Damian is going, ‘F****** yes!’ ”
No doubt. McCrory’s considerable sex appeal continues to gurgle away as we head to the bar. She is only 5ft 4in and dressed like a weird music-hall gangster in a billowing dress, tuxedo jacket and trilby. Yet she is captivating, her coal-black gaze shifting from playful to stern with her mood, as a pair of insane cheekbones flex like children’s fists under her eyes. “I never wanted to be the most popular girl at school,” she announces stagily at one point, and I wonder if this sort of confidence can rub people up the wrong way. Perhaps. I suspect it is also required to be the best at what you do.
Categories Interviews Peaky Blinders Print Media
BBC Media Centre: Interview with Helen McCrory
Helen McCrory plays Aunt Polly Gray in BBC Two’s Peaky Blinders
BBC Media Centre | August 23, 2013
You’re looking at a new generation of women that were no longer happy to stay at home with a clothes mangle and were coming out. This independence brings a friction to the family and this friction causes these strong characters to come through.
Describe the world of Peaky Blinders
The world is Birmingham, 1919, in the back streets where a gang called the Peaky Blinders are the top dogs. Named after caps they have razor blades in. It’s a world, post First World War. Where men are brutalised. Where women for the first time have had power and are having to hand it back to men. Where the local gypsy community is running the races. Where London talks to Birmingham, talks to Leeds, and these gangs are running a new society that was born from the First World War. Where people questioned everything that came from above. No longer was church or government good. The Ulster police were being shipped into this area because an anarchy was going on in the streets. And we play this anarchy and this street life.
Continue reading BBC Media Centre: Interview with Helen McCrory
Categories Damian Lewis Events Red Carpet Video
VIDEO: Damian Lewis and Helen McCrory at BAFTA TV Awards
Categories Damian Lewis Flying Blind Interviews Print Media
Helen McCrory: ‘Most of the Attention I Get is From Younger Men’
Playing a Mature Woman with a Youthful Lover
by Kate Kellaway | The Guardian | April 14, 2013
In her latest film Helen McCrory is once again playing a mature woman with a youthful lover. And why not, she asks? Though in real life, they’d have to fight off her husband, Damian Lewis, aka Brody from Homeland. It’s a good thing in an actor to know how to make an entrance, and Helen McCrory does. She arrives late – dashing in every sense. It’s not possible to walk into a room unobserved wearing a coat like hers: the colour of wet sand, with fur cuffs and lapels. Nor can it pass uncommented upon. Is it as comfortable as it is beautiful? “Comfortable on me as it was on the fox,” she says, with an air of self-mocking defiance, shrugging inside it: “It’s from Paris,” she adds, settling into the red leather corner banquette in Colbert, Sloane Square – a cafe engaged in a more doomed attempt than hers at recalling Paris.
Continue reading Helen McCrory: ‘Most of the Attention I Get is From Younger Men’