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).
