Lord Voldemort Tightens His Grip on the Wizarding World
by Gingersnap4Helen | YouTube | November, 2009
Categories Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Trailer Video
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.
Categories Audio Interviews Rosmersholm
BBC 4 Radio Woman’s Hour: Helen McCrory Talks About Rosmersholm
As Rebecca West in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm
BBC 4 Radio Woman’s Hour | May 30, 2008
The actress Helen McCrory has been acclaimed for her talent and her range: as one journalist put it, “not many actresses can say that they have played Cherie Blair, Lady Macbeth and Anna Karenina”. She is now in the Ibsen play “Rosmersholm” at the Almeida Theatre in London. The play is not the best known of Ibsen’s work and is the story of Rosmer, a former pastor and pillar of society, whose wife has committed suicide. Her companion, Rebecca West, has stayed at Rosmersholm and she and Rosmer become inspired by radical idealism. Helen McCrory joins Sheila to talk about the role and her life.
Listen here.
Rosmersholm is at the Almeida Theatre in London until 5th July
Categories Reviews Rosmersholm
Rosmersholm at the Almeida – Review
Helen McCrory and Paul Hilton star in a fascinating and complex play that was a favourite of Freud
by Benedict Nightingale | May 26, 2008 | The Times
At times Rosmersholm seems the most modern of Ibsen’s plays, at times the most dauntingly complex. Either way, Anthony Page’s revival maintains its grip, largely because Helen McCrory and Paul Hilton generate a quiet, unpretentious intensity while obeying the dramatist’s own orders: “No declamation, no theatricalities, express every mood in a way that seems credible and natural.”
Hilton’s Rosmer is a pastor who has lost his faith. He’s also the scion of an influential family and, as such, both a magnet and a target for his community’s warring factions. Indeed, it’s his floundering attempts to maintain a degree of idealism and become a reconciler and peacemaker that make him recognisable today. He manages to alienate both Malcolm Sinclair’s ferociously reactionary Kroll and Peter Sullivan’s Mortensgaard, the radical who aims to exploit his social and religious status. He’s that sorry figure, a piggy in the middle.