Category: Tributes

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The Chap: RIP Helen McCrory

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Remembering an inspiring encounter with Helen McCrory

Gustav Temple | April 17, 2021 | The Chap

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As a tribute to the late actress, who died aged 52 on 16th April, Gustav Temple recalls an inspiring encounter with Helen McCrory in 2019, on the eve of Series 5 of Peaky Blinders.

I interviewed Helen McCrory when the fifth season of Peaky Blinders was about to air in 2019. From such a huge star of stage and screen, I expected the familiar ‘luvvy’ personality and being called ‘darling’ interspersed with quotes from Shakespeare, but Helen was the complete opposite. When asked whether we had accurately described the type of cigarettes she smoked in character as Aunt Polly, she waved her hand airily and said, “Oh, who cares? Let’s not let the facts get in the way of a good story.”

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Categories Damian Lewis Print Media Tributes

Helen McCrory was a Titan of British theatre. But I mostly knew her as a mum

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Evening Standard editor Emily Sheffield pays tribute to Helen McCrory who has passed away aged 52 from cancer

By Emily Sheffield | April 19, 2021 | Evening Standard

Helen McCrory was a titan of our British theatre and our screens. Without question.

And God, she was glamorous too, we certainly shared a love of frocks. But I mostly knew her as a mum.

Her life as one half of a fabulously charismatic celebrity marriage was rarely discussed – though we did both talk about our work. She was serious and passionate about every job she took on.

Our two sons have been best friends from the age of four. School gate, school run, play dates and sports picnics.

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Categories Tributes

Helen McCrory: An extraordinarily eloquent actor who understood the power of silence like few others

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McCrory brought the same electrifying presence to mainstream TV roles and acclaimed stage work,

by Claire Allfree | April 17, 2021 | The Independent

Helen McCrory had an extraordinarily eloquent face, but her most expressive features, by some distance, were her eyebrows. She had an uncanny ability to raise them just so, in ways that could suddenly chill the air. In one of her final acting appearances, she used them in the concluding episode of ITV’s Quiz, playing a QC defending the coughing Major Ingram and his wife. Her gimlet-eyed performance was so icily forensic that she briefly became a Twitter sensation.

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Categories Print Media Theatre Tributes

Helen McCrory – Tribute: The Stage

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Categories Medea Print Media The Deep Blue Sea Tributes Uncle Vanya

How Helen McCrory Shone, Even in a Haze of Mystery

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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.

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