Helen McCrory
Actress, Mum and Philanthropist
Categories Charity Damian Lewis Events News Personal and Family Life Sir Hubert Von Herkomer Arts Foundation Tributes

Damian Lewis Narrates Helen McCrory’s Speech for UCS Hampstead Graduates

Remembering Helen at UCS Hampstead Graduation Ceremony

Source: UCS Hampstead | Twitter | June 30, 2021
Source: Sir HvH Arts | Instagram | June 30, 2021

On Wednesday, June 30, 2021, the University College School Hampstead’s graduation began proceedings by remembering Helen McCrory and her powerful message to pupils in 2018 with a narration of her speech by Damian today, speaking to the graduates remotely. UCS Hampstead supports Sir HvH Arts Foundation with their outreach, a foundation near and dear to Helen and now Damian is the Patron for Sir HvH Arts.  For more information about Helen’s UCS speech back in 2018, click here. In 2016, Damian and Helen attended an art exhibition showcasing UCS student’s artwork, chatting with them as well. Read more about that here.

Continue reading Damian Lewis Narrates Helen McCrory’s Speech for UCS Hampstead Graduates

Categories Charity Damian Lewis Personal and Family Life

Late actor Helen McCrory Supported Cornwall Family Through Cancer Tragedy

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.

Continue reading Late actor Helen McCrory Supported Cornwall Family Through Cancer Tragedy

Categories Print Media Tributes

Keats-Shelley Memorial Association Tribute

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.

Continue reading Keats-Shelley Memorial Association Tribute

Categories Damian Lewis Personal and Family Life Print Media Tributes

Damian Lewis On His Wife Helen McCrory

“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.

Continue reading Damian Lewis On His Wife Helen McCrory

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

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

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’