Category: Interviews

Categories Fearless Interviews Print Media

Star of Fearless Helen McCrory: ‘Of course you can’t have everything’

Posted On Written By helenistic No Comments on Star of Fearless Helen McCrory: ‘Of course you can’t have everything’

The actress on marriage to Damian Lewis and her fierce new TV role

by Andrew Billen | May 26, 2017 |  The Times
Helen McCrory: “I have never had a problem with sexuality on stage”
NICKY JOHNSTON/CAMERA PRESS

ITV really, really wanted Helen McCrory to star in its big conspiracy thriller, Fearless. When, in February last year, she explained she was otherwise committed, playing the troubled heroine of Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea at the National Theatre in London, the programme-makers said, fine, they would wait until she was done in the autumn and film then. Shortly before the play opened in June, Fearless’s writer, Patrick Harbinson — who, coincidentally, had worked with her husband, Damian Lewis, on Homeland — came to the theatre during rehearsals and bought her coffee.

“He came to convince me he’d written it for me,” she says. “Just like the actress before.”

Yet even this cynicism (which is meant as modesty) demonstrates why Helen McCrory is, indeed, perfect for the part of Emma Banville, a fearless, streetwise, no-bull lawyer investigating a wrongful conviction and an international government plot. The six-parter is due to be broadcast next month. If you want fierce in your female lead, you want McCrory, the murderous Aunt Polly in Peaky Blinders, the child-killing princess of Euripides’s Medea, the Vampire of Venice in Doctor Who, the evil Madame Kali in Penny Dreadful and, perhaps, most chillingly of all, Cherie Blair in Peter Morgan’s The Queen.

Continue reading Star of Fearless Helen McCrory: ‘Of course you can’t have everything’

Categories Damian Lewis Fearless Interviews Print Media Their Finest

Helen McCrory on her marriage to Damian Lewis: “He’s never given me reason to be jealous”

Posted On Written By helenistic No Comments on Helen McCrory on her marriage to Damian Lewis: “He’s never given me reason to be jealous”

A Thoroughly Modern Marriage

by Elizabeth Day | Stella Magazine | April 1, 2017

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).

Continue reading Helen McCrory on her marriage to Damian Lewis: “He’s never given me reason to be jealous”

Categories Interviews Peaky Blinders Print Media

A Quick Q&A with Aunt Polly of Peaky Blinders

Posted On Written By Gingersnap4Helen No Comments on A Quick Q&A with Aunt Polly of Peaky Blinders

Helen McCrory Tells What to Expect in the New Season Three

by Staff | Channel 24 | October 19, 2016

Cape Town – The hit show Peaky Blinders returns for a third season on BBC First (DStv 119).

Thomas Shelby (Cillian Murphy) is drawn into a maze of global intrigue in the electrifying new season of Steven Knight’s acclaimed family saga.

Approached by a secret organization on his own wedding day, Tommy finds himself at the center of an international arms deal that could change the course of history.

His legal and illegal businesses have made him rich beyond his dreams. .He now inhabits a Roaring Twenties world of beautiful people and sumptuous mansions, and he has found love at last. But Tommy’s relatives have become increasingly difficult to handle, and threaten to blow the Shelby family apart.

Aunt Polly (Helen McCrory) is Tommy’s second-in-command, the person he most trusts with the secrets and ambitions of the family business. But the return of her son Michael to the fold has made Polly uneasy about the company’s illegal enterprises. When she befriends a member of the upper classes, Polly imagines different possibilities for her future, and begins to ask herself questions that could strike at the very heart of the Peaky Blinders.

McCrory sat down for a quick Q&A about her characters and what to expect in the new season.

Where did we leave off with Polly in series two and how do we find her in series three?

We left Polly in series two having been reunited with the son that had been taken from her when he was young. She understandably feels hugely guilty about her past and wants to defend him with everything she has.  Campbell, played by Sam Neill, sees this weakness in her and uses it to humiliate her, compromising herself in order to save her son. Polly is further humiliated by the fact that her son and everyone else knows what she has done and so she does what Peaky Blinders do and she kills Campbell.

Continue reading A Quick Q&A with Aunt Polly of Peaky Blinders

Categories Interviews Print Media The Deep Blue Sea

‘Heart in her mouth’: Helen McCrory brings compassion to a tragic role in The Deep Blue Sea

Posted On Written By helenistic No Comments on ‘Heart in her mouth’: Helen McCrory brings compassion to a tragic role in The Deep Blue Sea

Helen McCrory’s Hester in The Deep Blue Sea

Peter Craven | September 29, 2016 | Sydney Morning Herald

Helen McCrory​ is at 48 one of the big-time actresses of the British stage, a classical actor who can burn up the stage in modern roles as well. You might have seen her as Cherie Blair with Helen Mirren in The Queen or as Narcissa Malfoy in the Harry Potter films, or on TV in Peaky Blinders.

In 2005 I saw her in the West End in what is arguably Shakespeare’s greatest comic role for a woman, Rosalind in As You Like It to Dominic West’s Orlando. McCrory’s voice was deep velvet and her wit razor sharp, a Rosalind for the ages.

Helen McCrory in The Deep Blue Sea.Helen McCrory in The Deep Blue Sea.CREDIT:RICHARD HUBERT SMITH

National Theatre live broadcasts have shown her in The Last of the Haussmans with Julie Walters, and as a riveting Medea. Now she’s doing a modern classic, Terence Rattigan’s​ The Deep Blue Sea.

“I worked with [Harold] Pinter on Old Times and when I asked him who his favourite modern playwright was he said Rattigan,” McCrory says. “How bizarre, I thought – how deeply bizarre. Surely they couldn’t be further apart in content and style?” Pinter with his menacing pauses, his uncanny ear for dark implications.

Continue reading ‘Heart in her mouth’: Helen McCrory brings compassion to a tragic role in The Deep Blue Sea