Category: Theatre

Categories Interviews Print Media The Late Middle Classes

Helen McCrory: ‘Attack yourself – don’t get lazy’

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Why Helen Loves Acting

by Maddy Costa | The Guardian | June 1, 2010

She’s played Cherie Blair, a Harry Potter villain and now a 1950s housewife. Helen McCrory tells Maddy Costa why she loves acting. Directors go out of their way to work with Helen McCrory. Pregnancy twice scuppered her plans to star as the passionate idealist Rebecca West in a London revival of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm – but rather than cast somebody else, its director, Anthony Page, kept rescheduling the production around her. Pregnancy also lost her the role of Bellatrix Lestrange in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, so its director, David Yates, saved the part of the equally wicked Narcissa Malfoy in the next three Potter films for her.

Now it’s the turn of David Leveaux, who, after several thwarted attempts to find a suitable joint project, has pinned her down to appear in Simon Gray’s play The Late Middle Classes, at London’s Donmar Warehouse. Add the fact that critics invariably praise her performances as luminous, vibrant, compelling and seductive, and it would be enough to make any actor complacent. Not McCrory. For her, it’s vital “to attack yourself, so you don’t become lazy”. Continue reading Helen McCrory: ‘Attack yourself – don’t get lazy’

Categories Interviews Print Media The Late Middle Classes

Time and Place: Helen McCrory

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The stage actress, 41, who played Cherie Blair in the film The Queen, recalls an idyllic childhood among snakes and sea urchins in Tanzania

by Caroline Rees | May 16, 2010 | The Sunday Times

Between the ages of six and nine, in the mid-1970s, I lived at 86 Haile Selassie Road in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. My father worked for the Foreign Office, and was posted there from Cameroon, which is practically 100% humidity, so we arrived mouldy with boils into the dry heat, which was beautiful.

The house was two storeys, painted white, with a horseshoe gravel drive. We never went into the right side of the garden: that was where the army ants lived. On the left were trees that we climbed; my father built a castle out of boxes and sprayed it silver.

A monitor lizard lived in the back garden; we’d lie on the ground and look at its eyes. We had monkeys at the front and love birds in the roof, which hopped all over the lawn in the morning.

Joseph, our cook, lived in a compound at the back with Bahari, his son. Bahari was a fantastic football player because he walked with a hobbled gait, which meant that, when he was dribbling, you never knew which way he would go. I loved sports, so Bahari and I played football all day. Apende, our ayah [nanny], seemed 1,000 years old, but my God she could move. One day, there was a snake in the kitchen. She ran in and whacked the shit out of it. My mum said: “Is it poisonous?” Apende said: “We kill first, ask later.”

Continue reading Time and Place: Helen McCrory

Categories Audio Interviews Rosmersholm

BBC 4 Radio Woman’s Hour: Helen McCrory Talks About Rosmersholm

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As Rebecca West in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm

BBC 4 Radio Woman’s Hour | May 30, 2008

The actress Helen McCrory has been acclaimed for her talent and her range: as one journalist put it, “not many actresses can say that they have played Cherie Blair, Lady Macbeth and Anna Karenina”. She is now in the Ibsen play “Rosmersholm” at the Almeida Theatre in London. The play is not the best known of Ibsen’s work and is the story of Rosmer, a former pastor and pillar of society, whose wife has committed suicide. Her companion, Rebecca West, has stayed at Rosmersholm and she and Rosmer become inspired by radical idealism. Helen McCrory joins Sheila to talk about the role and her life.

Listen here.

Rosmersholm is at the Almeida Theatre in London until 5th July

Categories Reviews Rosmersholm

Rosmersholm at the Almeida – Review

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Helen McCrory and Paul Hilton star in a fascinating and complex play that was a favourite of Freud

 

by Benedict Nightingale | May 26, 2008 | The Times

At times Rosmersholm seems the most modern of Ibsen’s plays, at times the most dauntingly complex. Either way, Anthony Page’s revival maintains its grip, largely because Helen McCrory and Paul Hilton generate a quiet, unpretentious intensity while obeying the dramatist’s own orders: “No declamation, no theatricalities, express every mood in a way that seems credible and natural.”

Hilton’s Rosmer is a pastor who has lost his faith. He’s also the scion of an influential family and, as such, both a magnet and a target for his community’s warring factions. Indeed, it’s his floundering attempts to maintain a degree of idealism and become a reconciler and peacemaker that make him recognisable today. He manages to alienate both Malcolm Sinclair’s ferociously reactionary Kroll and Peter Sullivan’s Mortensgaard, the radical who aims to exploit his social and religious status. He’s that sorry figure, a piggy in the middle.

Continue reading Rosmersholm at the Almeida – Review