Lord Voldemort Tightens His Grip on the Wizarding World
by Gingersnap4Helen | YouTube | November, 2009
Categories Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Trailer Video
Category: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Helen McCrory Comes Home for Harry Potter
After living in Los Angeles and featuring in NBC show Life with husband Damian Lewis, actress returns for latest JK Rowling
Helen McCrory poses for a portrait shoot in London on March 10, 2008. (Chris Terry/Contour by Getty Images)
Helen McCrory is puffing away on a roll-up outside the Charlotte Street Hotel, in Fitzrovia, concentrating intensely on a new role. “I am not,” she tells herself sternly, “only a mother.” The trouble is that for the past year, motherhood is the only part the actress has played, attending to the serious business of taking ladybirds off leaves, then putting them back again, with her two tiny children. The glamorous location was a house by the ocean in Santa Monica, where the contented stay-at-home wife of Damian Lewis (who was working on Life, an NBC cop series) settled almost too easily into the pattern of strolling with her babies down to the sea every morning in “just a pair of knickers” (the kids, not their mother).
She was amazed by the relentless work ethic around her: Damian’s 80-hour weeks of filming, the stream of cars on the six-lane freeway every morning, heading off to serve the Yankee dollar. “And people there never complain,” she says, pouring our tea with vicarage aplomb. “It’s always about the beautiful day, never ‘Oh f***, I’ve laddered my tights!’ Everyone you meet in the playground has had the teeth done, the skin done, the hair done…”
Categories Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Interviews Personal and Family Life Print Media The Special Relationship
Scotsman Interview: Helen McCrory
Whether it’s the former PM’s wife or an enchantress in Harry Potter, Helen McCrory approaches her roles with a light touch. And that attitude extends to family life
When I see Helen McCrory’s name attached to a project, a flash of happy anticipation illuminates my pleasure centre: I’m confident that whatever else, her performance will be worth the price of admission.
Phenomenal acting aside, she’s also a member of that special sisterhood whose magnetism crosses the gender divide, with a beauty all the more stirring for being tough to quantify. If pressed, I’d trace her charisma to the twinkle in her eyes and the wry smile tugging at her lips, hinting at secret knowledge – probably of the saucy variety.
This month we’ll see her in a far more high-strung persona, playing Draco’s mum, Narcissa Malfoy, in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. She approached the assignment with relish, keen to work with director David Yates. “Did you ever see (his] Sex Traffic? It was an absolutely fantastic film about two Polish girls forced into the sex industry in Britain.” Pregnancy prohibited her tackling the role of Bellatrix LeStrange, as was originally mooted some years ago and it went to Helena Bonham Carter, instead. Now, however, McCrory is able to play her sister.
Helen McCrory: The Dame Game
She’s a West End star who’s about to join her husband in Hollywood. No wonder critics call Helen McCrory the next Judi Dench, says Hannah Duguid
Despite being one of Britain’s foremost actresses, Helen McCrory is rarely recognised in public. Recently, a taxi driver refused to believe who she was. “You’re not Helen McCrory,” he said. She was unable to convince him of the truth. I can see how he made the mistake. In the flesh, despite having given birth only a few weeks before, she is slight, pretty and, although a formidable presence, does not remotely resemble Cherie Blair, whom she portrayed so convincingly in Stephen Frears’s film The Queen. “I’ve often sat down with people talking about a film I’ve been in and they haven’t realised I was in it. I think they’re just being weird by not saying anything until I realise what has happened,” she says. Not that she is phased by any of this: “What really matters to me is what my peers think.”
Her marriage to the actor Damian Lewis the couple have two children has occasionally propelled her on to the pages of magazines. But McCrory and Lewis seem as well grounded as it is possible to be when you’re one half of a famous couple who divide their time between north London and Los Angeles. There are flourishes of luvviness “darlings” and enthusiastic swearing with a cut-glass accent yet they are clearly devoted to each other. He accompanies her to our meeting at a Soho restaurant and settles her and their tiny baby son into a corner table before politely disappearing.