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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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In Memoriam: Helen McCrory

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A tribute to Helen McCrory and her extensive filmography

by Carly Horne | April 17, 2021 | The Courier

Following the announcement of Helen McCrory’s death on Twitter by husband Damian Lewis, comes the reflection of a life and career so full of exuberance and love. Although hers was a life cut far too short, it was also one marked by displays of endless generosity and incomprehensible levels talent which will surely be missed by all.

My first exposure to Helen McCrory came with the release of Skyfall in 2012. Something about her portrayal of Clair Dowar MP, a minor role relative to the scale of the film, just mesmerised me.

As Narcissa Malfoy in the Harry Potter films, she shone. The mother of school bully, Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton) and wife to notorious Death Eater, Lucius Malfoy (Jason Isaacs) – Narcissa could easily have been a two-dimensional character. A ‘bad’ character. It’s hard to get away from the fact Narcissa Malfoy was a prejudicial pure-blood, but Helen McCrory brought so much humility and poise to what might have otherwise been an insignificant role.

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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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Categories Print Media Tributes

Helen McCrory Tribute: The Times

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She Made the Supremely Difficult Appear Effortless

by Dominic Maxwell  | The Times | April 16, 2021

Helen McCrory’s fearlessness made her phenomenally watchable in whatever she did GETTY IMAGES

“You don’t realise how quick life passes you,” Helen McCrory told The Times in an interview in 2017. She was talking about coming relatively late to motherhood. Yet when her husband, Damian Lewis, announced on Twitter today McCrory’s tragically early death, aged 52, from cancer, it was a salutary reminder of how easy it is to take what you’ve got for granted.

It is not just eulogy speak to think of McCrory as one of our very finest actresses. She died as she lived, her husband said, “fearlessly”. It was that fearlessness that made her so phenomenally watchable in whatever she did. On television in Peaky Blinders or, most recently, Roadkill. On the big screen in the James Bond film Skyfall or three Harry Potter films. On stage in Medea orThe Deep Blue Sea at the National Theatre, or as Olivia in Sam Mendes’s production of Twelfth Night at the Donmar Warehouse. Wherever she turned up, she brought an extraordinary energy and an equally extraordinary ability to apply only as much of that energy as was needed.

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