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Categories A Little Chaos Damian Lewis Interviews Print Media

Helen McCrory interview: on motherhood, Damian Lewis and what makes her mad

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Helen McCrory talks about Celtic grit, her strict approach to parenting, and her equally sought-after husband

By Chloe Fox |
“There’s a whole generation of children growing up who don’t seem able to express themselves.” CREDIT: Photo: Kate Davis MacLeod

“As far as I can remember, I have never slept with Alan Rickman…” Helen McCrory is so deft a master at the art of the deadpan that it can be quite unsettling. We are having a late breakfast, and discussing how she came to accept the role of the evil Madame Le Nôtre in A Little Chaos, a romantic drama centred on the court of Louis XIV, which Rickman both directs and stars in. Unflinchingly serious, with one pencil-thin dark eyebrow raised, McCrory takes a slow sip of her coffee before allowing a glimmer of a smirk to give the game away.

While they have never been involved romantically on screen or otherwise, she and Rickman – both giants of the British theatre scene – have had a long-running friendship, cemented by the Harry Potter franchise (she played Narcissa Malfoy in three of the eight films in which he starred as Severus Snape). “I was absolutely thrilled when he sent me the script and asked me to come and play,” she says of A Little Chaos.

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Categories A Little Chaos Interviews Print Media

Alan Rickman & Helen McCrory: ‘With us it’s mostly about laughter and the odd Martini’

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From Harry Potter to A Little Chaos

by Adam Jacques | April 3, 2015 | The Independent

The two actors met in 2008, on the set of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

McCrory says of Rickman: 'He's a very subtle person: there's an art in the way he reads lines'
McCrory says of Rickman: ‘He’s a very subtle person: there’s an art in the way he reads lines’
 (Benjamin McMahon)

Helen McCrory, 46

An actress known for her work on stage (‘Uncle Vanya’, ‘Twelfth Night’, ‘Medea’), TV (‘Anna Karenina’, ‘Peaky Blinders’, ‘Penny Dreadful’) and film (‘The Queen’, ‘Skyfall’, the final three ‘Harry Potter’ movies), McCrory lives in north London with her husband, the actor Damian Lewis, and their two children

There are a lot of myths about Alan. That he is prickly and unpleasant – because he often plays quite cold, dry people – and that he always wears black. But he couldn’t be further from his screen personas if he tried. And I’ve seen him wear grey at least twice.

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Categories Interviews Print Media The Woman in Black, Angel of Death

Helen McCrory on the next Woman in Black and life with Damian Lewis

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A Busy Actress

by Kevin Maher | January 1, 2015, The Times

I first met Helen McCrory in a modest caravan, next to a haunted house, in the freezing Buckinghamshire countryside during the winter of 2013. The 46-year-old Peaky Blinders star, award-winning stage actress and wife of Damian “Homeland” Lewis OBE, was huddled next to a fan-heater in between set-ups on her new movie, the horror sequel The Woman in Black: Angel of Death. She was wearing a grim, lime green two-piece and a cruelly over-curled “do” (in the movie she plays a priggish 1940s school marm), but was otherwise on giddy, quip-friendly form.

“Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo was the first film I ever saw, and it still influences me today,” she said at one point, deadpan. “And you’ll see it in some of my roles, especially when I indicate before leaving a scene.”

She cheekily dismissed her part in The Woman in Black as that of a “background” player. She claimed that online fans who blog about her “hotness” were merely “a niche market of internet perverts”. But mostly she described, and clarified, her radical new career plan.

“I’ve decided, this year, that I’m simply going to do stuff that I haven’t done before — I’m doing this horror film, then some mad comedy, then Medea at the National Theatre, then a gothic TV series, plus I’ll do a second series of Peaky Blinders. Well, that’s the plan.”

Continue reading Helen McCrory on the next Woman in Black and life with Damian Lewis