Hester Collyer Archives - Helen McCrory

Helen McCrory: In Admiring, Awestruck Memory

On April 19, 2021April 25, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

We Remember a Great Actress Taken Way Too Soon

by Matt Wolf | BroadwayWorld | April 19, 2021

This one hurt. No death of course is easy to absorb, especially one as premature and shocking as that of Helen McCrory, whose surrender to cancer late last week, age 52, came like the most brutal and sudden of thunderclaps. The announcement was made via Twitter on Friday by her husband, Damian Lewis, and I doubt I’m the only one who reacted with moist-eyed disbelief, and not only because the couple were familiar, and welcome, faces in our north London neighbourhood.

It seemed only yesterday that I had seen her in the ITV adaptation of the James Graham play Quiz, lending a peppery authority to the role of the Ingrams’ defence barrister, Sonia Woodley. Or as the prime minister, thank you very much, opposite Hugh Laurie in Roadkill: a nice promotion for an actress who had previously played a PM’s wife, Cherie Blair, in the film The Queen.

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Helen McCrory: ‘If there’s one interesting thing about acting it’s trying to lose your ego’

On April 19, 2021May 9, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Three encounters with the great actor who has died at the age of 52

by Jasper Rees | April 19, 2021 |The Arts Desk

Helena McCrory as Hester Collyer in The Deep Blue Sea at the National Theatre in 2016

Each generation is given an actress who can do everything – be intimate with the camera but also coat a back wall in honey from 100 paces. There was Judi Dench, and then there was Imelda Staunton, both loved by all. Helen McCrory – who has died at the age of 52 – was the next in line, and she was destined to be as great for as long.

Even in her late twenties, when she was barely known, she was already and obviously different. She had a face that seemed prematurely mature and wise. She didn’t look like anyone else, nor sound it. Her voice was a husky instrument that moved between romance and rage. It could seethe and seduce, conquer and coax.

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Helen McCrory, versatile actress who dominated the stage and shone on screen in Peaky Blinders and The Queen – obituary

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

The Telegraph’s Charles Spencer put her in his ‘pantheon of actors whose name in the programme always creates the anticipation of pleasure’

ByTelegraph Obituaries | April 18, 2021 | The Telegraph

Helen McCrory, who has died of cancer aged 52, made her name as a subtle and intelligent stage performer, and later bucked the trend that consigns actresses to oblivion in middle age, becoming one of Britain’s most sought-after television stars in her 40s.

In the first decade of the new millennium she was hailed as one of the most promising presences in British theatre. Writing in the Telegraph in 2002, Jasper Rees placed her in the tradition of Judi Dench, Zoë Wanamaker and Imelda Staunton as “the small, punchy actress with a voice that can coat a back wall in honey from 100 paces.”

Continue reading Helen McCrory, versatile actress who dominated the stage and shone on screen in Peaky Blinders and The Queen – obituary

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Helen McCrory Remembered: ‘She had a brightness about her. She was a star’

On April 17, 2021April 19, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Richard Eyre, the National Theatre Director Who Cast the Actor in Some of Her Earliest Roles, Pays Tribute to Her After Her Death

by Richard Eyre | The Guardian | April 17, 2021

Helen McCrory. ‘The trumpets will have sounded for her on the other side.’ Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

Part of the tragedy of Helen McCrory dying at such a young age, leaving a husband and two young children, is that professionally she had everything to look forward to. She had established herself as a very considerable actor in the theatre and on film and television.

She had a brightness about her, a luminosity: she was, in short, a star. She lit up a stage or a screen – you knew you were in the presence of a force of character and talent.

When I was running the National Theatre in the 1990s we cast her in a play about the theatre called Trelawny of the Wells – part comedy, part melodrama.

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Tributes

Helen McCrory: An extraordinarily eloquent actor who understood the power of silence like few others

On April 17, 2021April 28, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

McCrory brought the same electrifying presence to mainstream TV roles and acclaimed stage work,

by Claire Allfree | April 17, 2021 | The Independent

Helen McCrory had an extraordinarily eloquent face, but her most expressive features, by some distance, were her eyebrows. She had an uncanny ability to raise them just so, in ways that could suddenly chill the air. In one of her final acting appearances, she used them in the concluding episode of ITV’s Quiz, playing a QC defending the coughing Major Ingram and his wife. Her gimlet-eyed performance was so icily forensic that she briefly became a Twitter sensation.

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