Damian Lewis Archives - Page 5 of 30

Late actor Helen McCrory Supported Cornwall Family Through Cancer Tragedy

On May 13, 2021May 15, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Helen’s Big Heart

by Sam Beamish | Cornwall Live | May 13, 2021

A close friend of the late Helen McCrory has told how the star supported her family through her daughter’s illness and death. Fiona Nash said the actor would do “anything for anyone” and was a “very kind and generous person”.

Fiona’s daughter Torie Benson died 10 years ago at age 30 due to cervical cancer.

To mark the anniversary of her death and raise money for the charity that supported her, Fiona’s 18-year-old son Toby Benson ran from Land’s End to The Lizard and back on Tuesday (May 11).

So far he has raised £15,500 for Marie Curie and is being backed by McCrory’s husband, actor Damian Lewis.

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Print Media Tributes

Keats-Shelley Memorial Association Tribute

On April 20, 2021April 20, 2021 By Gingersnap4Helen No Comments

Helen McCrory: A Tribute

by Staff | Keats-Shelley Memorial Association | April 19, 2021

Helen McCrory, right, with Damian Lewis, launching 2016’s Keats-Shelley Prize

Everyone at the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association and Keats-Shelley House was deeply saddened by the death of the much-loved actress Helen McCrory, who died last week aged just 52.

In 2016, Helen gave a dazzling performance at a breakfast-time event that helped launch the Keats-Shelley and Young Romantics Prizes. Together with her husband Damian Lewis, Helen read from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to a packed house at Albemarle Street, and dramatized the novel’s famous creation, with Helen playing Mary Shelley and Damian Percy Bysshe. After delivering a superb performance, Helen was just as generous with her time, talking to the winners of 2016’s Keats-Shelley and Young Romantics Poetry Prizes.

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Damian Lewis Personal and Family Life Print Media Tributes

Damian Lewis On His Wife Helen McCrory

On April 18, 2021October 23, 2021 By helenistic 8 Comments

“I’ve never known anyone able to enjoy life as much”

by Damian Lewis | The Sunday Times | April 18, 2021

Photo by Dave M. Benett/Getty Images

The star, who has died of cancer at 52, was a brilliant actress and an even better person, writes her husband.

As I sit down to write this, I can hear Helen shouting from the bed, “Keep it short, Damian, it’s not about you.”

I’ll try, but on a weekend when the papers, rightly, will be paying their respects to the Duke of Edinburgh, thousands of others around the world have been remembering m’Duchess, my Little One, royalty in her own right. And I’d like to throw in my tuppence worth …

When I say “royalty”, I am of course referring to the esteem in which Helen is held in our business. Her nickname to many was Dame Helen (apologies, Dame Helen), and although we’ll never know now whether that would have become a reality, I think secretly, we do know.

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As You Like It Medea Print Media Trelawny of the Wells Tributes Uncle Vanya

Helen McCrory: ‘One of the great actors of her generation’

On April 18, 2021April 20, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

As the Worlds of Stage and Screen Mourn the Effervescent Star, Our Chief Theatre Critic Looks Back on a Career – and Life – That Positively Blazed

by Nick Curtis | Evening Standard | April 18, 2021

“She had it all.” This is how the National Theatre’s artistic director Rufus Norris sums up Helen McCrory, whose crushingly sad death from cancer at 52 has robbed London of a woman who dazzled, onstage and off.

Although she found wide fame as Polly Gray in Peaky Blinders and as Narcissa Malfoy in the Harry Potter film franchise – and as half of London’s most glamorous theatre power couple, with her husband Damian Lewis – she was, first and foremost, one of the greatest stage actresses of the age. “Doing theatre is what made my heart sing,” McCrory said, according to Lewis’s own moving tribute this weekend.

Though blessed with superb comic poise, she excelled particularly in tragic roles: her National Theatre appearances alone embraced a poignant Nina in The Seagull (1994), a searing Medea (2014) and a heartbreaking Hester Collyer in Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea (2016), among others, making use of what Sam Mendes this weekend called her “explosive energy”.

Offstage she was wickedly witty, devoted to her friends and to her children, Manon and Gulliver. Her palpable zest for life makes her early death seem all the more unjust. As Lewis heartbreakingly wrote: “I’ve never known anyone able to enjoy life as much.”

Continue reading Helen McCrory: ‘One of the great actors of her generation’

Damian Lewis Feed NHS Personal and Family Life Print Media Tributes

John Vincent, CEO of Leon Restaurants, Reflects On Helen McCrory

On April 18, 2021April 19, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

FeedNHS Partners

by John Vincent, Chief Executive of LEON | The Telegraph | April 18, 2021

In the last year, Helen McCrory became a close colleague as we worked alongside her, her husband, Damian Lewis, and actor Matt Lucas on the #FeedNHS campaign. At the height of the first lockdown we spoke nearly every day and served over a million meals to NHS workers on the frontline.

On Friday afternoon, I was in my office when I heard the news.

My immediate thought was, no, they’ve got that wrong. People must have confused her with someone else. Just the day before, I had been writing about Helen, Damian and Matt, for Letters From Lockdown, a compilation of notes to two children about people’s lives in the past year. How could it be that she had passed away? I was shocked.

I didn’t know Helen was ill. I don’t know how long she was receiving treatment, nor what type of cancer she had. Part of me wondered if I should have known, if other people knew and I didn’t. Was there something I missed?