Tag: Aunt Polly

Categories Peaky Blinders Print Media Tributes

Peaky Blinders’ Steven Knight on Helen McCrory Tribute

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Knight: “I think we’ve done it right”

By Abby Robinson | Radio Times | February 22, 2022

Peaky-Blinders-Helen-McCrory

Peaky Blinders season 6 is fast approaching, with the final TV chapter (there’s a movie in the works) arriving on Sunday 27th February on BBC One and BBC iPlayer in the UK.

But while Cillian Murphy will be back as Tommy Shelby alongside a number of other fan favourites and some new faces, this will be the first chapter without Polly Gray following the death of Helen McCrory back in April 2021.

When news of McCrory’s death was announced by her husband Damian Lewis, there was an outpouring of grief from those in the industry who had worked alongside her and the millions of people who enjoyed her vast and varied career.

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Peaky Blinders’ Cillian Murphy on Helen McCrory, the show’s beating heart

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Series creator and stars pay tribute to the woman who made it a phenomenon

Benji Wilson | February 20, 2022 | The Sunday Times

Family ties: Helen McCrory as Aunt Polly in Peaky Blinders
Family ties: Helen McCrory as Aunt Polly in Peaky Blinders
ROBERT VIGLASKY/BBC
On the face of it there is no more machismo-laden, gun-slinging, smoke-smothered, balls-out blood-and-thunder television show than Peaky Blinders — back next week for its sixth and final series. The between-the-wars Birmingham gangster epic’s signature shot is a line of men in flat caps walking down a smog-smothered street in swaggering slow motion. Lo-fi garage rock music blares as the men caress their tommy guns. The image speaks: this is man’s work.

So when Helen McCrory was told in 2012 she was going to be playing a character called Aunt Polly in what was described to her as a period piece set in Birmingham, her answer was typically blunt. “I said, ‘No I’m not.’ I thought I’d be standing there with a mangle and a fag hanging out of my mouth wondering when the boys would come home. Little did I know.”

Yes, Cillian Murphy as Tommy Shelby is Peaky Blinders’ hard-as-nails poster boy. But the premise of Peaky Blinders is a story of broken men returning from the war and trying to fit into society. And that society had consisted of women while the men had been away. As Polly says to Tommy in the first episode: “This whole bloody enterprise was women’s business while you boys were away at war.”

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Peaky Blinders director hints Helen McCrory may appear in sixth season

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Will Polly Gray appear in Season Six of Peaky Blinders?

Stephen Milton | February 13, 2022 | The Sunday Times

Helenistic’s Note: Here is an extract from the director’s interview with The Sunday Times in which he talks about the sixth season of The Peaky Blinders and hints that Helen may appear in this season. You can read the interview in its entirety here.

The final season of Peaky Blinders will serve as a moment of reflection after the loss of Helen McCrory, who died from cancer last year. She played Polly, the legendary matriarch of the Shelby dynasty, but the actress was forced to abandon plans to reprise her role owing to the delays in production and the deterioration of her health. Byrne reveals that McCrory will make an important appearance in the new season opener, however.

“I had footage of Helen that I didn’t use during the last season and found this really special line that sets up season six so perfectly. In the opening scene, Tommy hears Polly’s voice in his head saying, ‘There will be war and one of you will die but which one I cannot tell.’ And that sets it up between Tommy and Michael Gray [Tommy’s cousin plotting to take control of the Shelby family empire]. It was perfect, a gift.

“It’s been a surreal experience and everyone who knew Helen, and loved working with her, is still processing what has happened. She was a really wonderful person.”

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Cillian Murphy: Final Season of ‘Peaky Blinders’ Is ‘Richest and Deepest’ to Date

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“I think the whole series is really in tribute to her and to honor her”

Monica Marie Zorrilla | Variety | February 11, 2022

Cillian Murphy was named one of the greatest Irish film actors in 2020 and has been nominated for multiple international awards over a 25-year career. But in stepping into an executive producing role in recent years, the “Peaky Blinders” star and frequent Christopher Nolan collaborator is discovering another side to the craft that’s been a humbling experience.

“I had to look at my own performances in a very cold and objective way,” Murphy tells Variety. “I think it’s a valuable lesson to look at the story in its entirety, without just, like, focusing on the size of your ears.”

When Murphy became a producer on Seasons 5 and 6 of “Peaky Blinders,” he had to take on new duties such as helping the edit team after long days of working as an actor and analyzing his portrayal of Tommy Shelby, the protagonist of the ruthless BBC period crime drama.

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Helen McCrory: A shining star at her peak

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She stole the show and our hearts

By Cole Moreton | February 6, 2022 | YOU Magazine

Aunt Polly dresses to kill. Literally. In series two of Peaky Blinders, she gets all glammed up in a hat, gloves and lace choker plus hidden revolver. It’s a scene that reveals her ruthlessness as she seeks outa police chief who has raped her. Polly gets close enough to kiss him, then shoots the devil through the heart. And as he dies, Polly spits out a line that has come to define the show: ‘Don’t f*** with the Peaky Blinders.’ As the camera lingers on her wild eyes and drying tears, we see again why Helen McCrory was hailed as one of the best actors of her generation, even before she agreed to play a leading role in this brutal family drama set in the slums of Birmingham just after the First World War.

Helen turned it down at first, for fear of being asked to play a cliché. ‘My own grandparents grew up in the slums of Glasgow and were miners’ kids in Cardiff and I thought I was going to be there with a mangle saying things like: “Gotta get up early to get a wash on in the back yard.”’

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