Interviews Archives - Page 28 of 28

Shakespeare’s Sister Act

On June 7, 2005May 14, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

As You Like it with Sienna Miller and Helen McCrory

By Jasper Rees | June 7, 2005 | Daily Telegraph

Sienna Miller, Jude Law’s fiancée, is making her West End debut in ‘As You Like It’, a play she’s never seen. But it helps that she and co-star Helen McCrory have become close friends. They talk to Jasper Rees

‘The part of Celia is the most important role in As You Like It. Discuss.” This question will not crop up in any exam you may happen to be sitting, but it must cross the mind of directors.

Shakespearean comedy is full of twins sundered by accident or fate whose reunion the plot works towards, but As You Like It is the one comedy that portrays the daily event of sibling love. Rosalind and Celia may be only cousins, but “being ever from their cradles bred together”, they are “like Juno’s swans… coupled and inseparable”. Theirs is the best sister act in Shakespeare. So a production that offers a great Rosalind but an indifferent Celia gives with one hand but takes away with the other.

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Interviews Old Times Print Media

Old Times at the Donmar Warehouse – Review

On July 10, 2004May 13, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Helen McCrory: Memories are made of these

by Sam Marlowe | July 10, 2004 | The Independent

In an old interview with Helen McCrory, there’s an eye-catching account of her first day at a rough Bletchley school. The story goes that the young Helen was sent home in disgrace after defending herself from a skinhead schoolboy thug (who threatened her with a knife) by breaking his arm. Sitting opposite the delicate, dark-eyed heroine of this tale, I try to picture the scene, and I have to ask: is it true? “Did you read it in a paper? Then what do you think?” replies the actress with a throaty laugh. “No, of course it’s not true. It was me being rather sarcastic. I’ve soooo learnt that irony does not read well in print.”

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Interviews Print Media Uncle Vanya

Mendes’s Dream Team

On September 3, 2002April 15, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Helen McCrory talks to Jasper Rees about her roles in Sam Mendes’s valedictory double bill at the Donmar Warehouse

by Jasper Rees | September 3, 2002 | The Telegraph

It’s only French actresses who will tell you in that detached, nonchalant way of theirs that, yes, they are beautiful. British actresses are more used to telling you that they’re not.

Take the following strident example. “I think I’m very lucky not to be beautiful,” says Helen McCrory. “I know more actors unhappy about being beautiful than the other way round. I find it really baffling, this modern obsession with people wanting to look good on screen or on stage. Why? Why?” She spits out the words. “I’m an actor, not a model.”

The oddity is that McCrory plays a lot of beautiful women. Yes, she took her first big lead in the television film Streetlife as an owl-eyed, bleach-blonde, child-murdering single mum on a Cardiff sink estate. But her square cheekbones and violently black eyes are better known to television viewers as the face of Anna Karenina, the most head-turning woman ever to hurl herself under a train in the pages of a classic novel.

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In a Little World of Our Own Interviews Print Media Stand and Deliver

Theatre: In a World of Whose Own?

On March 3, 1998May 8, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

She is an actress with a chameleon-like ability to swap accents, he is a writer whose work is anchored in his native Belfast. Together, they are on stage at the Donmar

by Jasper Rees | March 3, 1998 | The Independent

ACTORS fall into two broad categories: those who play themselves and those who play other people. One type gets recognised in the street rather more than the other. Last year, while Lynda La Plante’s Trial and Retribution was being screened, Helen McCrory found herself dragged into a pub debate about the moral issues thrown up by the series. “I assumed arrogantly that this conversation had been sparked off by the fact that they knew who I was. They asked me my opinion and I realised after about 10 minutes they had no idea.”

You can see why. McCrory is currently at the Donmar in In a Little World of Our Own, a new play by Gary Mitchell in which she puts on an Ulster accent to play a born-again Christian in the heart of Protestant Belfast. In Stand and Deliver, a BBC film by Les Blair, she plays a feckless English photographer in Glasgow. In The James Gang, a road movie directed by Mike Barker, she’s a Scot who fetches up in Wales. The Donmar play opens the theatre’s annual “Four Corners” season: it sounds as if McCrory could play all four corners herself.