Helen McCrory
Actress, Mum and Philanthropist

Tag: Aunt Polly

Categories Media Peaky Blinders Print Media

Helen McCrory: ‘Marry someone you love and someone who you like. I am incredibly lucky.’

Posted On Written By helenistic No Comments on Helen McCrory: ‘Marry someone you love and someone who you like. I am incredibly lucky.’

 Helen McCrory shares the secrets behind her successful marriage to Damian Lewis

Chrissy Iley | April 23, 2016 | Daily Mail

She’s the feisty star of Peaky Blinders with forthright views on nudity, politics and why actors aren’t role models. He’s the Homeland heart-throb with an OBE. So who’s boss in the McCrory-Lewis house? The actress reveals all to Event…

In the flesh Helen McCrory's a fierce, sexy woman with refreshing views on nudity, the NHS and the gender pay gap in Hollywood 

In the flesh Helen McCrory’s a fierce, sexy woman with refreshing views on nudity, the NHS and the gender pay gap in Hollywood

Helen McCrory is rather pleased her husband, Homeland and Wolf Hall star Damian Lewis OBE, has been objectified as a pin-up, with topless shots from US TV series Billions plastered over the papers and glossy magazines alongside other British hunks Tom Hiddleston and Aidan Turner.

‘It’s lovely. Every wife wants to be with someone everyone finds attractive. Just like every husband wants to feel their wife is attractive,’ she says, perched at the bar of a London members’ club in high black boots and a black high-necked fitted dress with a sexy split in the skirt.

Continue reading Helen McCrory: ‘Marry someone you love and someone who you like. I am incredibly lucky.’

Categories Interviews Peaky Blinders Print Media

Helen McCrory from Peaky Blinders on playing lethal Aunt Polly

Posted On Written By helenistic No Comments on Helen McCrory from Peaky Blinders on playing lethal Aunt Polly

Helen McCrory as Aunt Polly shows it isn’t just the men who are deadly in Peaky Blinders

By Matt Bungard | November 17, 2014 | The Age

Did you have to do much research into the actual Peaky Blinders gang before you took on the role?

There’s not that much written about the Peaky Blinders – there’s about two or three books that touch on them, and that touch on the violence in Birmingham and the gangs that were going around in the north of England at the time. But what I did do is I spoke a lot to (program creator) Steven Knight, and he was inspired by stories that his father told him. [His father] had been sent to deliver a message to his uncle, and he was terrified; he had to go to a part of town that he’d never been to. He went down Garrison Lane and knocked on the door and went into a smoke-filled room, and saw it was an illegal betting shop. And in the room, behind the glass there were these three men drinking homemade gin out of jam jars and were wearing the most beautiful three-piece suits and peaked caps, surrounded by piles of money. And his father became obsessed with this world – he didn’t ever join it, but he found out all these stories and passed them on to Steve. And so really, Steve is the person that all the actors go to to talk about these stories and he knows all these characters; they all existed. So it was through him, really. Like a lot of this history, it’s passed on orally but isn’t written down.

Continue reading Helen McCrory from Peaky Blinders on playing lethal Aunt Polly

Categories Interviews Peaky Blinders Print Media

Helen McCrory exclusive interview – Peaky Blinders

Posted On Written By helenistic No Comments on Helen McCrory exclusive interview – Peaky Blinders

Daniel Falconer |

Credit: BBC

With the second series of fantastic BBC Two drama Peaky Blinders just around the corner, we couldn’t resist catching up with Helen McCrory – who plays Aunt Polly – to find out just what we can expect from the show and her character going forward.

Going back to before series one, what initially drew you to the role of Aunt Polly in Peaky Blinders?

Well I was sent the scripts in the traditional way, they came through the post, and Otto Bathurst phoned me up who I’d worked with before and said: ‘There’s a part I’d like you to have a look at’, and I was just fascinated in this world. I didn’t think that I’d seen it on British television before. I thought that we’re known in Britain to do our television histories, but they tend to be of the upper classes or Upstairs, Downstairs set in London, in a white stucco house crescent and to see a whole world that was now set in working class, criminal streets of Birmingham, with men coming back from the First World War, and the impact of war on them, the impact of communism, the impact of women suddenly working at home and working out of the home and having to hand it back to the men was just a fascinating part of our own history, that we are still reeling from now and picking up the consequences from. So, I said ‘yes’, and then on top of that, Otto talked to me about the way that he wanted to film it – was much more in the world of John Ford and the Westerns, and instead of doing British gritty realism, to make it look cinematic and to have fun with it, and we’ve continued that into the second series – these huge epic landscapes and, this idea of Wild West, still prevails as a tone.

Continue reading Helen McCrory exclusive interview – Peaky Blinders