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How Helen McCrory Shone, Even in a Haze of Mystery

On April 17, 2021April 19, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

She Was Unforgettable Onstage Playing Seemingly Serene Women Who Rippled With Restlessness

by Ben Brantley | The New York Times | April 17, 2021

Helen McCrory in the National Theater revival of Terence Rattigan’s “The Deep Blue Sea.” Credit: Richard Hubert Smith

Selfishly, my first feelings on hearing that the uncanny British actress Helen McCrory had died at 52 were of personal betrayal. We were supposed to have shared a long and fruitful future together, she and I. There’d be me on one side of the footlights and her on the other, as she unpacked the secrets of the human heart with a grace and ruthlessness shared by only a few theater performers in each generation.

I never met her, but I knew her — or rather I knew the women she embodied with an intimacy that sometimes seemed like a cruel violation of privacy. When London’s theaters reawakened from their pandemic lockdown, she was supposed to be waiting for me with yet another complete embodiment of a self-surprising life.

Ms. McCrory had become world famous for dark and exotic roles onscreen, as the fiercely patrician witch Narcissa Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies and the terrifying criminal matriarch Polly Gray in the BBC series “Peaky Blinders.” But for me, she was, above all, a bright creature of the stage and in herself a reason to make a theater trip to London.

Continue reading How Helen McCrory Shone, Even in a Haze of Mystery

Print Media Tributes

Helen McCrory Tribute: The Times

On April 16, 2021April 19, 2021 By helenistic 1 Comment

She Made the Supremely Difficult Appear Effortless

by Dominic Maxwell | The Times | April 16, 2021

Helen McCrory’s fearlessness made her phenomenally watchable in whatever she did GETTY IMAGES

“You don’t realise how quick life passes you,” Helen McCrory told The Times in an interview in 2017. She was talking about coming relatively late to motherhood. Yet when her husband, Damian Lewis, announced on Twitter today McCrory’s tragically early death, aged 52, from cancer, it was a salutary reminder of how easy it is to take what you’ve got for granted.

It is not just eulogy speak to think of McCrory as one of our very finest actresses. She died as she lived, her husband said, “fearlessly”. It was that fearlessness that made her so phenomenally watchable in whatever she did. On television in Peaky Blinders or, most recently, Roadkill. On the big screen in the James Bond film Skyfall or three Harry Potter films. On stage in Medea orThe Deep Blue Sea at the National Theatre, or as Olivia in Sam Mendes’s production of Twelfth Night at the Donmar Warehouse. Wherever she turned up, she brought an extraordinary energy and an equally extraordinary ability to apply only as much of that energy as was needed.

Continue reading Helen McCrory Tribute: The Times

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Helen McCrory: a towering, irreplaceable figure of stage and screen

On April 16, 2021May 19, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Helen McCrory had star quality

by The Newzly Desk |April 16, 2021 | The Newzly

Helen McCrory: a towering, irreplaceable figure of stage and screen

Helen McCrory’s final stage performance now stands as a monument to a towering, irreplaceable figure of stage and screen. In 2016, as Hester Collyer in The Deep Blue Sea, she turned Terence Rattigan’s heroine into a woman who is simply too big for the confining 1950s world she has been born into. The performance was a gift; she electrified every inch of the National Theatre’s stage.

Print Media Tributes

Helen McCrory: engaging, enthralling, always magnetically watchable

On April 16, 2021April 26, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

The exquisitely talented actor shone at playing complex, intelligent women with a seemingly effortless skill

by Mark Lawson | April 16, 2021 | The Guardian

Extreme … Helen McCrory in the National Theatre’s 2014 production of Medea. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

It seems fitting that one of Helen McCrory’s final screen performances in a career devastatingly truncated by her death at 52 was as a barrister. In last year’s ITV drama Quiz, she played Sonia Woodley QC, hired to defend Major Charles Ingram and his wife Diana, accused of conspiring to steal the titular prize in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? through a code based on studio coughing.

With a majority of viewers likely to be convinced of the Ingrams’ guilt (from media coverage of the case in 2003), McCrory as Woodley in episode three presented an alternative interpretation so engagingly and persuasively that the previous two episodes seemed to be cast into doubt.

Medea Old Times Peaky Blinders Print Media The Deep Blue Sea Tributes Uncle Vanya

Helen McCrory would have been the next Helen Mirren or Judi Dench

On April 16, 2021May 14, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

The actress leaves an extraordinary body of work, but there is no doubt that she had so much more to give

The wonder for me about Helen McCrory – whose passing, at 52, is so cruel, so sad, such a profound and premature loss to the acting profession – is how relatively long it took for people to cotton on to her magnificence.

I was lucky enough to visit the Tricycle, north London one winter evening in 1995 and see her star as Lady M in Macbeth. In fact, of course, she wasn’t then the “draw” – here was, surprisingly enough, a Shakespeare production at a major off-West End venue renowned for its contemporary political work. It was an oddity from artistic director Nicolas Kent. Yet within the space of a couple of hours, I emerged with her name on my lips, and the surest conviction that I had set eyes on one of the greats.

Here was an actress who was so intense, so spellbinding, so caught up in every moment of every scene she was in that it was as though she carried a lifetime’s acting experience within her: but she was just in her mid-20s. Her flintiness illuminated every line it sparked off. Rapt, I ended my review of that dark, sinister torch-lit night, referencing the sleepwalking scene, saying that “it is the sight of McCrory alone, scurrying restlessly round in the dark and hugging a single flame, that burns a lasting image of unstoppable evil onto your retina.”