helenistic, Author at Helen McCrory

Sicily for Bambini: A Family Holiday with Helen McCrory and Damian Lewis

On August 1, 2010April 16, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Playtime, Pampering, and Pasta

by Helen McCrory | British Airways Highlife | August 1, 2010

Damian and children practice sword fighting in the castle ruins, Caltabellotta (Courtesy of Helen McCrory)

Actors Helen McCrory and husband Damian Lewis plus their two children head to Sicily for playtime, pampering and pasta.

‘Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, that’s a wrap!’ It’s 1am and I’m standing in a disused industrial park in London in the rain. We’ve been filming the same ten lines for hours now and even the writer has fallen out of love with the scene. But who cares. In 12 hours, I shall be sitting by the pool in Rocco Forte’s Sicilian Verdura Golf & Spa Resort for a week of pampering, peace, pasta and a bit of good old-fashioned shuteye.

My husband Damian and I both know Italy well, but I have never visited Sicily. Damian went there some years ago with a mate on an Edwardian-style grand tour, when he’d quickly learnt the all-important phrase ‘Posso avere una camera con due letti, per favore’ — which translates as ‘a single room with two separate beds, please’ — after they had been presented with a luxurious double bed on their first night. But they stayed in the northern part of the island and Verdura is on the southwest coast between Sciacca, a fishing port, and Agrigento, home to some of the best-preserved Greek temples in the world. The resort also has a children’s crèche, and we have a three-year-old, Manon, and a two-year-old, Gulliver, with energy levels that would put even the Sicilians’ famous love of children to the test. It sounds perfect.

Continue reading Sicily for Bambini: A Family Holiday with Helen McCrory and Damian Lewis

VIDEO: Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, Part 1, Official Trailer

On June 30, 2010May 14, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Back at Hogwarts

by IGN | You Tube | June 30, 2010

Print Media Reviews The Late Middle Classes

The Late Middle Classes at the Donmar Warehouse – Review

On June 2, 2010May 13, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

The Late Middle Classes is Simon Gray at the very top of his game

By Charles Spencer | June 2, 2010 | The Telegraph

Finally, 11 years after its premiere, and almost two years after the dramatist’s death, Simon Gray’s The Late Middle Classes has made it into London.

This rich, haunting play, mostly set in the early Fifties on Hayling Island and with a period flavour so strong that you can almost taste the powdered egg, was bumped out of the West End last time around by a dire musical.

In a way, you can see why those who blocked the play’s transfer back in 1999 were nervous.

There is a rare subtlety, and ambiguity about the piece, a mixture of comedy combined with something far darker that resists easy explanation or analysis.

Continue reading The Late Middle Classes at the Donmar Warehouse – Review

Reviews The Late Middle Classes

Review: The Late Middle Classes

On June 1, 2010April 15, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Smooth Operator… Helen McCrory in The Late Middle Classes

by Michael Billington | June 1, 2010 | The Guardian

Helen McCrory in The Late Middle Classes at the Donmar Warehouse — Photograph: Johan Persson

Justice has finally been done. This Simon Gray play expired on the road in 1999 without ever making it to the West End. Now, in David Leveaux’s sensitive revival, it emerges as one of Gray’s best plays: a quietly moving portrait of repressive 1950s England and, in particular, of the way children often become the victim of adult dreams and desires.

The action is bookended by two present-day scenes in which the mature Holly visits his former music teacher. But the bulk of the story takes place on Hayling Island in the 1950s where the 12-year-old Holly is caught between conflicting emotional needs.

Interviews Print Media The Late Middle Classes

Helen McCrory: ‘Attack yourself – don’t get lazy’

On June 1, 2010April 12, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Why Helen Loves Acting

by Maddy Costa | The Guardian | June 1, 2010

She’s played Cherie Blair, a Harry Potter villain and now a 1950s housewife. Helen McCrory tells Maddy Costa why she loves acting. Directors go out of their way to work with Helen McCrory. Pregnancy twice scuppered her plans to star as the passionate idealist Rebecca West in a London revival of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm – but rather than cast somebody else, its director, Anthony Page, kept rescheduling the production around her. Pregnancy also lost her the role of Bellatrix Lestrange in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, so its director, David Yates, saved the part of the equally wicked Narcissa Malfoy in the next three Potter films for her.

Now it’s the turn of David Leveaux, who, after several thwarted attempts to find a suitable joint project, has pinned her down to appear in Simon Gray’s play The Late Middle Classes, at London’s Donmar Warehouse. Add the fact that critics invariably praise her performances as luminous, vibrant, compelling and seductive, and it would be enough to make any actor complacent. Not McCrory. For her, it’s vital “to attack yourself, so you don’t become lazy”. Continue reading Helen McCrory: ‘Attack yourself – don’t get lazy’