Category: Interviews

Categories Fashion and Style Interviews Print Media Video

VIDEO: How Helen McCrory Gets Glam

Posted On Written By Gingersnap4Helen No Comments on VIDEO: How Helen McCrory Gets Glam

Helen Shares Her BAFTA Red Carpet Confidence Secrets

by Jo Glanville Blackbird | Woman & Home | February 6, 2015

With awards season underway, and more than 50 dresses lined up by her stylist, Helen McCrory, who has starred in Skyfall and Harry Potter, needs inspiration for her red carpet look.

Helen regularly turns to her own personal favourite hairdresser, Charles Worthington, the annual official stylist to the EE British Academy Film Awards (BAFTAs) taking place on Sunday for help getting ready.

‘I have horrible hair’, laughs Helen. ‘The word ‘shocking’ comes to mind! It’s frizzy and fine, and is rarely in good condition because, as an actress, it’s constantly being bleached and dyed, straightened, curled and cut to suit a role’.

‘So, using proper hair products is important to me because I’m not one of those women who gets up in the morning and looks fantastic!’, Helen explains as we join her on set.

Continue reading VIDEO: How Helen McCrory Gets Glam

Categories Damian Lewis Fashion and Style Interviews Personal and Family Life Print Media

Vogue Interview with Helen McCrory and Damian Lewis

Posted On Written By helenistic No Comments on Vogue Interview with Helen McCrory and Damian Lewis

No Place Like Homeland

by Staff | Vogue | January 20, 2015

“Do you know, I think you might wear a suit better than any man I’ve ever met.” In the intimate and strangely forbidden confines of a lift at the National Theatre, Helen McCrory’s heavily made-up hazel eyes are drinking in her husband’s tall, tailored frame.

“Thank you,” he replies, faintly awkwardly, looking down at the same Tom Ford tuxedo he wore to accept the best actor Emmy award only last month. “Does this mean you want me to do all the washing-up for a week?”

A gypsy laugh bubbles up from deep inside McCrory’s tiny dancer’s body.

“No, my darling, of course not! Just the bedtime stories…”

Continue reading Vogue Interview with Helen McCrory and Damian Lewis

Categories Interviews Print Media The Woman in Black, Angel of Death

Helen McCrory on the next Woman in Black and life with Damian Lewis

Posted On Written By helenistic No Comments on Helen McCrory on the next Woman in Black and life with Damian Lewis

A Busy Actress

by Kevin Maher | January 1, 2015, The Times

I first met Helen McCrory in a modest caravan, next to a haunted house, in the freezing Buckinghamshire countryside during the winter of 2013. The 46-year-old Peaky Blinders star, award-winning stage actress and wife of Damian “Homeland” Lewis OBE, was huddled next to a fan-heater in between set-ups on her new movie, the horror sequel The Woman in Black: Angel of Death. She was wearing a grim, lime green two-piece and a cruelly over-curled “do” (in the movie she plays a priggish 1940s school marm), but was otherwise on giddy, quip-friendly form.

“Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo was the first film I ever saw, and it still influences me today,” she said at one point, deadpan. “And you’ll see it in some of my roles, especially when I indicate before leaving a scene.”

She cheekily dismissed her part in The Woman in Black as that of a “background” player. She claimed that online fans who blog about her “hotness” were merely “a niche market of internet perverts”. But mostly she described, and clarified, her radical new career plan.

“I’ve decided, this year, that I’m simply going to do stuff that I haven’t done before — I’m doing this horror film, then some mad comedy, then Medea at the National Theatre, then a gothic TV series, plus I’ll do a second series of Peaky Blinders. Well, that’s the plan.”

Continue reading Helen McCrory on the next Woman in Black and life with Damian Lewis

Categories Interviews Peaky Blinders Print Media

Helen McCrory from Peaky Blinders on playing lethal Aunt Polly

Posted On Written By helenistic No Comments on Helen McCrory from Peaky Blinders on playing lethal Aunt Polly

Helen McCrory as Aunt Polly shows it isn’t just the men who are deadly in Peaky Blinders

By Matt Bungard | November 17, 2014 | The Age

Did you have to do much research into the actual Peaky Blinders gang before you took on the role?

There’s not that much written about the Peaky Blinders – there’s about two or three books that touch on them, and that touch on the violence in Birmingham and the gangs that were going around in the north of England at the time. But what I did do is I spoke a lot to (program creator) Steven Knight, and he was inspired by stories that his father told him. [His father] had been sent to deliver a message to his uncle, and he was terrified; he had to go to a part of town that he’d never been to. He went down Garrison Lane and knocked on the door and went into a smoke-filled room, and saw it was an illegal betting shop. And in the room, behind the glass there were these three men drinking homemade gin out of jam jars and were wearing the most beautiful three-piece suits and peaked caps, surrounded by piles of money. And his father became obsessed with this world – he didn’t ever join it, but he found out all these stories and passed them on to Steve. And so really, Steve is the person that all the actors go to to talk about these stories and he knows all these characters; they all existed. So it was through him, really. Like a lot of this history, it’s passed on orally but isn’t written down.

Continue reading Helen McCrory from Peaky Blinders on playing lethal Aunt Polly