Helen McCrory
Actress, Mum and Philanthropist

Category: Interviews

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Helen McCrory interview: Diamonds and David Bailey, darling!

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The down-to-earth Helen McCrory on her new show, ‘We’ll Take Manhattan’, and her terror of the red carpet

by Bryony Gordon | January 16, 2012 | The Telegraph
An interview with Helen McCrory cannot pass without it being noted how normal she is, so we may as well start as we mean to go on. The star of no less than three Harry Potter movies has taken the Tube to our interview in a café off the Holloway Road, a less than salubrious neighbourhood just around the corner from her north London home. McCrory, who is dressed in very normal Topshop, and has a very normal head of unbrushed black hair, left a voicemail to let me know she might be a little late – “I don’t want you to be sitting there twiddling your thumbs,” it said – and then followed up with another call to tell me when she was getting on the Piccadilly line.
A lighting at Holloway Road station, I notice a sign warning commuters that the area is a hot spot for mobile phone thieves. When I arrive at the café McCrory, 43, is standing outside on her mobile waving gaily – not at me, but some burly bloke across the road. “We’re doing a transaction,” she winks conspiratorially, and I immediately think “drugs!”, but it is only 11 in the morning and, as a middle-class mother of two young children, drugs can’t be at the top of McCrory’s list of priorities, even if at times she felt driven to them.

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Categories Interviews Print Media We'll Take Manhattan

Helen McCrory: The talented actress revels in her new role

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by Maureen Paton | January 3, 2012 | Daily Mail

Helen McCrory is the go-to girl for playing spirited characters. So who better to immortalise fearsome Vogue fashion editor Lady Clare Rendlesham in a BBC drama about her clash with photographer David Bailey in the 1960s? Here she talks to Maureen Paton about kinky boots, kohl eyes and tantrums with typewriters

'The great thing about acting is that you can learn from other people's mistakes,' says Helen

‘The great thing about acting is that you can learn from other people’s mistakes,’ says Helen

She was the fire-breathing fashion editor who once staged a rock-starry tantrum by hurling her typewriter – eek! – out of the window. A dragon crossed with a diva, Lady Clare Rendlesham reigned over British Vogue and then Queen in the swinging 60s and championed all the style setters, from Mary Quant to Susan Small and Jean Muir. In 1964 she tore up the glossy-magazine rulebook by edging Queen’s front page with a funereal black border and running the provocative headline ‘Paris is Dead’, to proclaim the overtaking of French couture by London street style. And when she later opened an Yves Saint Laurent boutique in London’s Bond Street (with one of her beloved dogs invariably kipping on a designer frock in the window), some customers were too scared to enter if Lady R was on the premises.

They don’t make fashion queens as fearsome as that any more. And now this sacred monster is about to be immortalised on screen in a piece of casting made in heaven. Husky drawl that could seduce a man at 30 paces? Check. Tongue as sharp as tailor’s scissors? Check. Dramatic dark looks, dimples to die for and a highly individual sense of chic? Check, check, check. Who better to play the legendary Lady R than maverick Helen McCrory? The multi-award-winning stage and screen actress is the go-to girl when it comes to portraying life’s more vivid characters (such as Cherie Blair – twice, in The Queen and The Special Relationship).

Continue reading Helen McCrory: The talented actress revels in her new role