Categories Damian Lewis Flashbacks of a Fool Interviews Personal and Family Life Print Media Rosmersholm

Helen McCrory: The Importance of Being Sex

Helen McCrory likes to speak her mind. A lot.

by Maureen Patton | April 12, 2008 | Daily Mail

Helen McCrory

Hold on to your hats as the natural heir to Judi Dench and Maggie Smith spells out exactly why she won’t do stage and screen nudity.

“I don’t want to sign for a job that I have to have a bikini wax for,” says Helen, who persuaded the director of BBC’s 2003 drama series Charles II to ditch the full-frontals before she would agree to play the sexually voracious Countess of Castlemaine.

For as she puts it, “sex is all in the brain”.

Life’s not all froth for award-winning actress Helen McCrory. Married to handsome actor Damian Lewis, she appears to have it all…

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Categories Damian Lewis Interviews Personal and Family Life Print Media The Queen

Great Expectations: An Interview with Helen McCrory – August 25, 2006

Drama Queen

by Lydia Slater | Evening Standard Magazine | August 25, 2006

Perched on a velvet sofa in the elegant sitting room of the Cheyne Walk Brasserie, Helen McCrory strokes her Stella McCartney-clad stomach and smiles under heavy eyelids, rather like the cat who’s got the cream. As well she might. Life has never seemed to be particularly tough for McCrory, 37, who has been winning plaudits for her acting ever since she took her first role in the National Theatre’s production of Trelawney of the Wells, and who is constantly tipped as the next Judi Dench.

But even by her own high standards, the future is looking pretty rosy. She is eight months pregnant with her first child, and has an unnervingly perfect celebrity bump – no fat ankles or swollen face, just a watermelon at the waistline and a correspondingly magnificent bronzed cleavage. “I’ve never worn so many low-cut dresses in my life. If I could just wear spangles, I would. I feel so amazingly attractive,” she gurgles throatily, with total justice if our young waiter’s saucer eyes are anything to go by.

McCrory doesn’t appear to notice him but then if you’re engaged to Damian Lewis, star of The Forsyte Saga and Band of Brothers (and arguably the sexiest redhead on the planet), waiters probably come rather low in the pecking order. “I’ve never been broody before, but when I met Damian I became very different about relationships,” she says.

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Categories Damian Lewis Five Gold Rings Print Media Reviews

Five Gold Rings at the Almeida – Review

Joanna Laurens’ “Five Gold Rings” has loftier things in mind than the mere settling of domestic scores

by Matt Wolf | January 4, 2004 | Variety

Not every dysfunctional family drama contains lines like, “It is art to fly speech in the air,” but Joanna Laurens’ Almeida Theater entry “Five Gold Rings” has loftier things in mind than the mere settling of domestic scores. In her sophomore play following her much-praised debut effort “The Three Birds” (which I missed), Laurens wants to reinvent the discourse in such plays, trading in a time-worn naturalism for a heightened language that less charitably inclined playgoers likely will find wearing.

That the evening possesses the considerable fascination it does honors both director Michael Attenborough, in his second consecutive play at this address as Almeida a.d. (following Neil LaBute’s “The Mercy Seat”), and a blue-chip cast of British theater veterans (David Calder) and ascending younger talents (Damian Lewis, Helen McCrory), all of whom are in top form. Sure, “Five Gold Rings” may sound at times as if it has been translated from Latin, but it’s unlikely to encounter more gifted interpreters.

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Categories Damian Lewis Five Gold Rings Print Media Reviews

Five Gold Rings at the Almeida – Review

Five Gold Rings

by Michael Billington | December 19, 2003 | The Guardian

I feel sorry for Joanna Laurens. Having been praised for the poetic inventiveness of her first play, The Three Birds, I suspect she will take a lot of flak for writing a non-naturalistic family drama. Yet, since we sanction all kinds of wild physical theatre, it seems only right that we should find room for linguistic experiment.

Laurens’s play sounds like a conventionally unhappy family reunion. Henry, a penniless patriarch living in a mysterious desert, is attended at Christmas by his two sons and their wives. But both marriages are in trouble; and when the supposedly impotent Daniel is attracted to his childless sister-in-law, Miranda, the skeletons come tumbling out of the family cupboard. Daniel’s plan to flee with Miranda is unwittingly financed by his brother, Simon, which leads to revelations of revenge, rape and incest.

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