Meet the Shelby Family
by BBC | You Tube | September 5, 2013
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Helen McCrory: ‘Move over, darling’
Helen McCrory prefers Chekhov to chick lit and enjoys a stormy marriage to Damian Lewis
You hear Helen McCrory before you see her, which I imagine is often the case, as she is very loud. Hidden behind the door of a bedroom in Claridge’s, she is peeling off a final layer of clothing for Style’s photographer. “Well, it is the end of the day, darling,” comes the boom. “Sod it.” Clever, confident and a little bit camp, McCrory, 45, is considered by many to be the finest actress of her generation — but today she is simply in the mood to hold court and show some skin. Won’t Damian Lewis, her superstar husband, mind her getting her kit off, asks a member of the crew? “No, no, no,” she says. “Damian is going, ‘F****** yes!’ ”
No doubt. McCrory’s considerable sex appeal continues to gurgle away as we head to the bar. She is only 5ft 4in and dressed like a weird music-hall gangster in a billowing dress, tuxedo jacket and trilby. Yet she is captivating, her coal-black gaze shifting from playful to stern with her mood, as a pair of insane cheekbones flex like children’s fists under her eyes. “I never wanted to be the most popular girl at school,” she announces stagily at one point, and I wonder if this sort of confidence can rub people up the wrong way. Perhaps. I suspect it is also required to be the best at what you do.
Categories Interviews Peaky Blinders Print Media
BBC Media Centre: Interview with Helen McCrory
Helen McCrory plays Aunt Polly Gray in BBC Two’s Peaky Blinders
BBC Media Centre | August 23, 2013
You’re looking at a new generation of women that were no longer happy to stay at home with a clothes mangle and were coming out. This independence brings a friction to the family and this friction causes these strong characters to come through.
Describe the world of Peaky Blinders
The world is Birmingham, 1919, in the back streets where a gang called the Peaky Blinders are the top dogs. Named after caps they have razor blades in. It’s a world, post First World War. Where men are brutalised. Where women for the first time have had power and are having to hand it back to men. Where the local gypsy community is running the races. Where London talks to Birmingham, talks to Leeds, and these gangs are running a new society that was born from the First World War. Where people questioned everything that came from above. No longer was church or government good. The Ulster police were being shipped into this area because an anarchy was going on in the streets. And we play this anarchy and this street life.
Continue reading BBC Media Centre: Interview with Helen McCrory
Categories Interviews Peaky Blinders Video
VIDEO: Peaky Blinders Season 1 UK Premiere
Interview with Helen McCrory
by Russell Nelson of RedCarpetNewsTV | YouTube | August 21, 2013
PART 1:
Helen McCrory: ‘I used to think sexually charged roles were exploitative. Now I’m in my forties, I think it’s art’
Bagging the sort of sexually charged roles that reflect the complex reality of middle age
by Liz Hoggard | April 6, 2013 | The Independent
Helen McCrory
“I seem to be incredibly low,” Helen McCrory complains, swivelling in her modish chair. In the arch-tones of a tabloid journalist, she declares: “Helen McCrory seems to have shrunk enormously since I last saw her. So it was no surprise when she told me she was starring in The Hobbit. I knew she was Welsh, but really?”
At a private members’ club, wolfing down breakfast, McCrory, 5ft 3in, looks like an angelic child rather than a woman of 44 who just happens to be married to Britain’s most desirable man – Damian Lewis, 42, the Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning star of Homeland. These days we see her on the red carpet, wearing slinky Marchesa frocks and De Beers diamonds. But McCrory seems enviably normal, with the actor’s gift of intimacy and silliness. In that deep, thespy voice she can segue from Chekhov to contact lenses, and make both sound equally thrilling.
In the past two years she has played a Cabinet minister in Skyfall, terrified as Narcissa Malfoy in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and was hand-picked for Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning children’s film. Oh, and she’s just received an Olivier Best Supporting Actress nomination for her role as a fortysomething daughter at odds with her ageing hippie mother, played by Julie Walters, in The National’s The Last of the Haussmans. It was a performance to make you howl and weep with recognition.