Helen McCrory

Actress, Mum and Philanthropist
Categories Print Media Reviews We'll Take Manhattan

We’ll Take Manhattan on BBC Four – Review

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A Drama about David Bailey’s romance with Jean Shrimpton

by Tom Sutcliffe | January 27, 2012 | The Independent

Sutcliffe’s Third Law of Dodgy Dialogue runs as follows: “If an East End character employs both elements of a bit of rhyming slang then they are probably a Cockernee – television’s caricature of an East Ender – rather than the real thing.” Example: a young jack-the-lad photographer asks his assistant: “What happened to that bird from Pinner with the big Eartha Kitts?” If he’d said this at all, surely he would have said “big Earthas”, and left it at that. But, since the audience can’t be trusted to work it out, or, possibly, to know that Kitt follows Eartha, it had to be clumsily signposted in We’ll Take Manhattan, John McKay’s drama about David Bailey’s romance with Jean Shrimpton. Bailey spent quite a bit of time being a Cockernee in this film because one of its themes was the clash between the brash young upstarts who would make the Sixties swing and the old guard who thought it was vulgar for it to move at all.

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Categories Print Media Reviews We'll Take Manhattan

We’ll Take Manhattan on BBC Four – Review

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 The relationship between photographer David Bailey and model Jean Shrimpton

By Luke Leitch | January 26, 2012
We'll Take Manhattan: Karen Gillan and Aneurin Barnard
We’ll Take Manhattan: Karen Gillan and Aneurin Barnard CREDIT: Photo: BBC

“You utter beast,” panted Lady Lavinia, her couture skirts hoicked northwards in a most unladylike fashion.

“Go on. You love it,” drawled the tradesman’s-bejacketed David Bailey towards the nape of her pearl-encircled neck as he ravished her.

Roll over, Sherlock. For it was at this precise moment that the blink-and-you’d’ve-missed-it clue purporting to crack the conundrum at the heart of We’ll Take Manhattan (BBC Four) – a stylish, pleasingly frothy drama about the fashion photographer David Bailey and his first, defining muse Jean Shrimpton – was revealed.

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Categories Interviews Print Media Skyfall We'll Take Manhattan

Helen McCrory interview: Diamonds and David Bailey, darling!

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The down-to-earth Helen McCrory on her new show, ‘We’ll Take Manhattan’, and her terror of the red carpet

by Bryony Gordon | January 16, 2012 | The Telegraph
An interview with Helen McCrory cannot pass without it being noted how normal she is, so we may as well start as we mean to go on. The star of no less than three Harry Potter movies has taken the Tube to our interview in a café off the Holloway Road, a less than salubrious neighbourhood just around the corner from her north London home. McCrory, who is dressed in very normal Topshop, and has a very normal head of unbrushed black hair, left a voicemail to let me know she might be a little late – “I don’t want you to be sitting there twiddling your thumbs,” it said – and then followed up with another call to tell me when she was getting on the Piccadilly line.
A lighting at Holloway Road station, I notice a sign warning commuters that the area is a hot spot for mobile phone thieves. When I arrive at the café McCrory, 43, is standing outside on her mobile waving gaily – not at me, but some burly bloke across the road. “We’re doing a transaction,” she winks conspiratorially, and I immediately think “drugs!”, but it is only 11 in the morning and, as a middle-class mother of two young children, drugs can’t be at the top of McCrory’s list of priorities, even if at times she felt driven to them.

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Categories Interviews Print Media We'll Take Manhattan

Helen McCrory: The talented actress revels in her new role

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by Maureen Paton | January 3, 2012 | Daily Mail

Helen McCrory is the go-to girl for playing spirited characters. So who better to immortalise fearsome Vogue fashion editor Lady Clare Rendlesham in a BBC drama about her clash with photographer David Bailey in the 1960s? Here she talks to Maureen Paton about kinky boots, kohl eyes and tantrums with typewriters

'The great thing about acting is that you can learn from other people's mistakes,' says Helen

‘The great thing about acting is that you can learn from other people’s mistakes,’ says Helen

She was the fire-breathing fashion editor who once staged a rock-starry tantrum by hurling her typewriter – eek! – out of the window. A dragon crossed with a diva, Lady Clare Rendlesham reigned over British Vogue and then Queen in the swinging 60s and championed all the style setters, from Mary Quant to Susan Small and Jean Muir. In 1964 she tore up the glossy-magazine rulebook by edging Queen’s front page with a funereal black border and running the provocative headline ‘Paris is Dead’, to proclaim the overtaking of French couture by London street style. And when she later opened an Yves Saint Laurent boutique in London’s Bond Street (with one of her beloved dogs invariably kipping on a designer frock in the window), some customers were too scared to enter if Lady R was on the premises.

They don’t make fashion queens as fearsome as that any more. And now this sacred monster is about to be immortalised on screen in a piece of casting made in heaven. Husky drawl that could seduce a man at 30 paces? Check. Tongue as sharp as tailor’s scissors? Check. Dramatic dark looks, dimples to die for and a highly individual sense of chic? Check, check, check. Who better to play the legendary Lady R than maverick Helen McCrory? The multi-award-winning stage and screen actress is the go-to girl when it comes to portraying life’s more vivid characters (such as Cherie Blair – twice, in The Queen and The Special Relationship).

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