Helen McCrory

Video: North Square

On October 18, 2000May 7, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Episodes 1-10

by Helenistic | You Tube / Wikipedia | October 18, 2000

North Square is a British television drama series written and created by Peter Moffat, and broadcast by Channel 4 from 18 October to 20 December 2000. Starring an ensemble cast, including Phil Davis, Rupert Penry-Jones, Helen McCrory and Kevin McKidd, the series is set around the practice of a barristers’ chambers in Leeds. The series was filmed in and around the real life Park Square, Leeds. This is the area in the city where the majority of barristers’ chambers are concentrated. The full series was released on DVD for the first time by Acorn Media UK in 2012. Continue reading Video: North Square

VIDEO: Anna Karenina Official Trailer and All Episodes

On May 9, 2000May 16, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Tolstoy’s Masterpiece comes to life

Helenistic | You Tube | May 9, 2000

Anna Karenina is the young wife of an older husband. She has an affair with the handsome Count Vronsky. By following her desires, Anna complicates her life.

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Anna Karenina Print Media

All About Anna

On May 8, 2000April 25, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Helen McCrory asks why the 19th century character still appeals to 21st century women

by Helen McCrory | The Guardian | May 8, 2000

How should a woman live her life? Survive to the age of 70, fearfully, being as everyone else instructs her to be? Or play the heroine, passionately, in the knowledge that trying and failing need not equal defeat?

This is the timeless conundrum Tolstoy’s vivid heroine, Anna Karenina, took on, long before it became fashionable to discuss the conflict of desire and expectation in women’s lives. She was an original of her era, but what are the resonances of Anna’s story for the modern woman?

Born into the wealthy, decadent upper class of 19th-century St Petersburg, Anna confronts the hypocrisy of the day when she breaks free of an empty marriage after falling in love with army officer Vronsky. She scandalises her contemporaries when she chooses to live with him as his mistress, after her husband refuses her a divorce. But her passion for her lover is tempered by the pain of leaving her son and the disapproval heaped on her by the Russian aristocracy. Spiralling into depression and opium addiction, she starts to doubt Vronsky. A bout of morbid jealousy tips her over the edge and she throws herself under a train.

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Anna Karenina Reviews

Anna Karenina Review: The Love Train

On May 7, 2000April 13, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

What on earth would Tolstoy have thought? Channel 4 have upped the raunch factor in Anna Karenina, his heavyweight morality tale. But it’s a good move, reckons Mark Lawson

Mark Lawson | May 7, 2000 | The Guardian

Tolstoy can’t have known, when writing a novel back in the 1870s, that trains rushing into tunnels would become a cinematic euphemism for sex. But his book about a Moscow political wife’s passion for a soldier – in which the speed of trains is a metaphor for the dangers and consequences of sexual passion – has consistently attracted film-makers. David Selznick cast Garbo in 1935, while Alexander Korda chose Vivien Leigh for the role in 1947. More recently, the writer-director Bernard Rose made a movie version with Sophie Marceau. Now Helen McCrory stars in a new four-part TV adaptation of Anna Karenina (Tuesday, 9pm, Channel 4).

Penelope Fitzgerald – a fine novelist who died last week – once expressed the hope that television would soon run out of great novels to adapt, and return literature to readers. But, although there are the inevitable losses – authorial tone and psychological complexity – Anna Karenina is, at the basic but crucial level of plot, the perfect book for TV.

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Print Media Reviews Triumph of Love

The Triumph of Love at the Almeida – Review

On September 6, 1999May 12, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Helen McCrory is a Very Special Talent

Matt Wolf | September 6, 1999 | Variety

It takes a very special actress to burst the fey, densely plotted artifice that comes with the plays of Marivaux, but Helen McCrory is a very special talent indeed. Her amazing performance last year in “How I Learned to Drive” — a portrait of awakened sexuality both confident and fearful — transformed Paula Vogel’s play, and McCrory is scarcely less commanding amid the thicket of amorous intrigue that defines “The Triumph of Love.” Her surroundings on this occasion, however, aren’t nearly as happy as they were at the Donmar Warehouse last year, and even the staunchest of admirers may have trouble sitting through the (intermissionless) evening.

The problem is a production that is pitched somewhere between the Keystone Kops and “As You Like It” — McCrory and sidekick Tonia Chauvet would make a terrific Rosalind and Celia — of a play that is beloved by academics but is arid and even dull in performance, defying a decidedly eccentric supporting cast to bring it to tingling life.

Continue reading The Triumph of Love at the Almeida – Review