Category: Theatre

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Playwright David Hare and Peaky Blinders Creator Steven Knight Pay Tribute to Helen

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“She Lit Up the Screen”

by David Hare and Steven Knight | Radio Times | April 27, 2021

David Hare Section:

One Saturday night in 1995 I sat down to watch a Screen Two film on BBC2. Streetlife, written and directed by Karl Francis, was about a single mother in a caravan in Wales, struggling to provide for her young child.

Although the material was bleak – Jo kills her child because she despairs of her future – it was played with the most extraordinary humour and vitality by a young actor I’d never seen before. She wore a tiny mini skirt, sparked with brave life, and gave one of the most moving performances I’d ever seen on TV.

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Stephen Beresford Remembers His Friend Helen McCrory

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Helen McCrory Was a Great Actor — and a Great Human. The Playwright Stephen Beresford Praises his Friend’s Restless, Curious Nature

by Stephen Beresford | The Times | April 22, 2021

             Kindred spirit: McCrory in Beresford’s play The Last of the Haussmans DONALD COOPER/ALAMY
My first “in the flesh” sighting of Helen was on a spring morning in 2012. She was hunched over a pouch of rolling tobacco on the low wall beside the National Theatre’s stage door. She was giving off an air of “don’t notice me”, which is a tricky thing to pull off while wearing a fedora. Anyone who knew Helen recognised that crouched, industrious position of hers; a swift, practised kinesis, ending with a bravura lick of the cigarette paper and a head tilt; half provocative, half playful, as if to say: “Well now. Are you going to be interesting?”

There was no possibility of my being interesting. I was too terrified. It was the first day of rehearsals for my first play, and it was happening at the National Theatre. I was about to walk into a room full of people I had long admired: Julie Walters, Howard Davies, Rory Kinnear, Nick Hytner — and, of course, Helen.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” she said, sliding her arm into mine as though we had known each other for 40 years. “I’m terrible at read-throughs.”

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Helen McCrory: In Admiring, Awestruck Memory

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We Remember a Great Actress Taken Way Too Soon

by Matt Wolf | BroadwayWorld | April 19, 2021

This one hurt. No death of course is easy to absorb, especially one as premature and shocking as that of Helen McCrory, whose surrender to cancer late last week, age 52, came like the most brutal and sudden of thunderclaps. The announcement was made via Twitter on Friday by her husband, Damian Lewis, and I doubt I’m the only one who reacted with moist-eyed disbelief, and not only because the couple were familiar, and welcome, faces in our north London neighbourhood.

It seemed only yesterday that I had seen her in the ITV adaptation of the James Graham play Quiz, lending a peppery authority to the role of the Ingrams’ defence barrister, Sonia Woodley. Or as the prime minister, thank you very much, opposite Hugh Laurie in Roadkill: a nice promotion for an actress who had previously played a PM’s wife, Cherie Blair, in the film The Queen.

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Helen McCrory: ‘If there’s one interesting thing about acting it’s trying to lose your ego’

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Three encounters with the great actor who has died at the age of 52

by Jasper Rees | April 19, 2021 |The Arts Desk

Helena McCrory as Hester Collyer in The Deep Blue Sea at the National Theatre in 2016

Each generation is given an actress who can do everything – be intimate with the camera but also coat a back wall in honey from 100 paces. There was Judi Dench, and then there was Imelda Staunton, both loved by all. Helen McCrory – who has died at the age of 52 – was the next in line, and she was destined to be as great for as long.

Even in her late twenties, when she was barely known, she was already and obviously different. She had a face that seemed prematurely mature and wise. She didn’t look like anyone else, nor sound it. Her voice was a husky instrument that moved between romance and rage. It could seethe and seduce, conquer and coax.

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Helen McCrory, versatile actress who dominated the stage and shone on screen in Peaky Blinders and The Queen – obituary

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The Telegraph’s Charles Spencer put her in his ‘pantheon of actors whose name in the programme always creates the anticipation of pleasure’

ByTelegraph Obituaries |

Helen McCrory, who has died of cancer aged 52, made her name as a subtle and intelligent stage performer, and later bucked the trend that consigns actresses to oblivion in middle age, becoming one of Britain’s most sought-after television stars in her 40s.

In the first decade of the new millennium she was hailed as one of the most promising presences in British theatre. Writing in the Telegraph in 2002, Jasper Rees placed her in the tradition of Judi Dench, Zoë Wanamaker and Imelda Staunton as “the small, punchy actress with a voice that can coat a back wall in honey from 100 paces.”

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