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It’s All About Family Ties for Helen McCrory

On December 1, 2011April 27, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Helen Talks Family Life

December 1, 2011 | The Wall Street Journal Europe

Damian, Helen, and the little ones in October

How does your weekend start?

There is never a habitual regime, but there is delight in the household because my children, Manon (5) and Gulliver (4), understand that there’s no school. This means that their horrible mother allows them to watch television because they are not allowed during the week. The first thing they want to do is glue themselves in front of the TV. We also have cinema night and we all make our own popcorn and we make pizza. It’s a real treat. They both love seafood like octopus and calamari. We all sit down and watch a film or something.

Do you ever go out just with your husband?

Yes. [Actor] Damian [Lewis] and I go out a lot. I like the theater a lot. I like anything if it’s live… from Country and Western [to] Chinese opera. The last piece of theater I went to see was “Anna Christie” at the Donmar Warehouse with Jude [Law], Ruth [Wilson] and David Hayman. They are friends of ours. After the theater, we would then go to a restaurant.

Do you have a favorite restaurant?

I really love the Salt Yard. It’s got very good tapas and a great wine list. If you don’t have much time, you can just get some cheese, ham and a bottle of red wine. Or, if you want to go there earlier, you can have a big, long meal.

Will you sometimes cook at home on a Friday night?

A lot of the time we would actually just cook. The kids are in bed and I will come downstairs and cook. We have a record player in the kitchen and we always find a new vinyl. We would put it on and listen to new records. And to actually listen to a whole album is great. I got the [reggae band] Burning Spear and we listened to that. We had a glass of wine and Damian made some fish cakes. We sit and chat and just hang out.

What’s your Saturday routine like?

We usually go out to the Heath [in Hampstead]. We live quite near there. We are outdoorsy and we would often go out with other gangs of children.

In the area we live, there’s a large show of children who run from one house to another house to another house. That’s lovely because it means all the children play together, and all the adults get to sit around and have coffees and read the papers or go to the park. We can all sit and chat, and they can all run riot.

Do you have some time for yourself?

The only time I ever spend alone is when I am working or when my husband is away filming. I put the kids to bed and have an hour and a half in the evening for myself. I listen to Radio 4 all the time. I didn’t go to university, so that’s my further education.

What would you do more of if you had time?

It’s nice to sit down and read the whole of whatever magazine I am reading with a cup of coffee. Then you are like: Wow! I actually read the whole magazine.

But to be honest, my husband and my children are my best friends. I am just aware that these are the golden years. There’s a time in your life when you are incredibly happy and then are times that are s—. And the s— will come again, because that’s life. I am aware that this is a good time. So I am celebrating that. I am the happiest I have ever been.

Damian Lewis Interviews Personal and Family Life Print Media

Celebrity Foodies Take Lucy Hunter Johnston Out to Lunch

On June 10, 2011April 16, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Damian Lewis and Helen McCrory at J Sheekey

by Lucy Hunter Johnston | The Evening Standard | June 10, 2011

Damian Lewis
I met Harold Pinter for the first time at J Sheekey. He was charming, undeniably rather gruff and imposing, but he adored Helen, so I was happy to let him flirt with her all night while I talked to his wife Antonia. It was in the very early days of our relationship, but I wasn’t jealous; I was proud.

I love being part of the legacy of Sheekey’s. It’s taken a while, though. I didn’t start coming properly until I was in my thirties. Trying to book a table when I was 25 would have felt pretentious; you need to earn your stripes. The Parisian/New York brasserie feel of the place is completely to my taste. They are so warm and welcoming here that they just gather up regulars, and always look after you and find you a last-minute table.

Helen and I partied very, very hard before we met and then we collided at the Almeida in 2004 [in Five Gold Rings] and together we partied even harder. We used to lose entire evenings listening to jazz at Ronnie Scott’s. We love to dance, and when we weren’t out we’d put on music really loudly and dance around the house, just the two of us.

I proposed to Helen in Paris. I tried to do it on the Pont Neuf – I was sweating bullets and wrestling in my overcoat pocket for the ring, which had got stuck in a little Cellophane bag, but when I finally got it out, a gaggle of Japanese tourists surrounded us like a flock of seagulls, taking pictures, and the moment was totally destroyed. I now take Helen back to Paris for three days without our two kids [Manon, four, and Gulliver, three] every February for our anniversary. We walk about the city, and sit in bars drinking rosé.

I only really started cooking when I became a dad. Helen was flat out breastfeeding and sleeping, exhausted all the time. I realised that if I didn’t cook, we wouldn’t eat. Now I love to cook Gary Rhodes’ fishcakes with a lemon butter sauce and green beans. I’m no food connoisseur, though; foodies have palates that can speak hundreds of different languages – mine can only manage about one.

Helen McCrory

The first time I came to Sheekey’s was when I was working at the Donmar in 2002 [in Uncle Vanya and Twelfth Night] with Sam Mendes and Kate Winslet and I fell in love with the fish pie. It’s since become one of those places that I have visited so many times that it feels like my local pub. I have so many memories of evenings spent here. I look in one corner and think of the first time Brian Selznick came over: we all had dinner here with Scorsese. We’re here all the time; last week we saw Sienna [Miller] in Flare Path and all had dinner here afterwards; the week before we were here with Benedict [Cumberbatch] after seeing him in Frankenstein. The other day I bumped into Dom West in the street and we sat at the bar and had Welsh rarebit and a Guinness. When Sienna and I were in As You Like It we used to come every lunchtime and every evening. I would order razor clams with broad beans and chorizo, then fish pie with mushy peas, and finish with Scandinavian iced berries.

When I’m working on stage I rush around a lot, so I can eat more, but when we’re filming it’s completely different. Basically everyone arrives on the first day at their normal weight and leaves double the size, spines crushed a foot shorter with fat. That’s the problem with eating on the Harry Potter set [she plays Narcissa Malfoy]. It’s even worse when you’re doing a US production – they may have sushi and salad bars in addition to the burgers, but I have seen living proof that you can get fat on salad. That said, Damian and I love eating out twice a week, we always have. Even when the children were really little we’d take them in cots. We were big party animals, but now instead of keeping going until the early hours, we’ll be done by midnight and think, ‘Wow, what a fantastic evening.’ It’s an age thing; quite frankly, we don’t have the staying power we used to.

Read the rest of the article here.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Interviews Print Media

Helen McCrory Comes Home for Harry Potter

On July 12, 2009April 15, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

After living in Los Angeles and featuring in NBC show Life with husband Damian Lewis, actress returns for latest JK Rowling

by Lesley White | July 12 2009 | The Sunday Times

Helen McCrory is puffing away on a roll-up outside the Charlotte Street Hotel, in Fitzrovia, concentrating intensely on a new role. “I am not,” she tells herself sternly, “only a mother.” The trouble is that for the past year, motherhood is the only part the actress has played, attending to the serious business of taking ladybirds off leaves, then putting them back again, with her two tiny children. The glamorous location was a house by the ocean in Santa Monica, where the contented stay-at-home wife of Damian Lewis (who was working on Life, an NBC cop series) settled almost too easily into the pattern of strolling with her babies down to the sea every morning in “just a pair of knickers” (the kids, not their mother).

She was amazed by the relentless work ethic around her: Damian’s 80-hour weeks of filming, the stream of cars on the six-lane freeway every morning, heading off to serve the Yankee dollar. “And people there never complain,” she says, pouring our tea with vicarage aplomb. “It’s always about the beautiful day, never ‘Oh f***, I’ve laddered my tights!’ Everyone you meet in the playground has had the teeth done, the skin done, the hair done…”

Continue reading Helen McCrory Comes Home for Harry Potter

Damian Lewis Interviews Personal and Family Life Print Media The Queen

Great Expectations: An Interview with Helen McCrory – August 25, 2006

On August 25, 2006April 12, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Drama Queen

by Lydia Slater | Evening Standard Magazine | August 25, 2006

Perched on a velvet sofa in the elegant sitting room of the Cheyne Walk Brasserie, Helen McCrory strokes her Stella McCartney-clad stomach and smiles under heavy eyelids, rather like the cat who’s got the cream. As well she might. Life has never seemed to be particularly tough for McCrory, 37, who has been winning plaudits for her acting ever since she took her first role in the National Theatre’s production of Trelawney of the Wells, and who is constantly tipped as the next Judi Dench.

But even by her own high standards, the future is looking pretty rosy. She is eight months pregnant with her first child, and has an unnervingly perfect celebrity bump – no fat ankles or swollen face, just a watermelon at the waistline and a correspondingly magnificent bronzed cleavage. “I’ve never worn so many low-cut dresses in my life. If I could just wear spangles, I would. I feel so amazingly attractive,” she gurgles throatily, with total justice if our young waiter’s saucer eyes are anything to go by.

McCrory doesn’t appear to notice him but then if you’re engaged to Damian Lewis, star of The Forsyte Saga and Band of Brothers (and arguably the sexiest redhead on the planet), waiters probably come rather low in the pecking order. “I’ve never been broody before, but when I met Damian I became very different about relationships,” she says.

Continue reading Great Expectations: An Interview with Helen McCrory – August 25, 2006

As You Like It

As You Like It at Wyndhams Theatre – Review

On June 21, 2005October 25, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

As I like it

By Nicholas de Jongh | June 21, 2005 | The Evening Standard

I like to be nicely shocked at the theatre, and David Lan duly satisfies by giving As You Like It a sharp but appropriate Gallic make-over. Here in high heels, highish humour and a slinky, little black dress, comes Shakespeare’s wittiest heroine, Helen McCrory’s flirtatious Rosalind.

She is first seen sipping red wine with Sienna Miller’s bland, blonde Celia, in a Parisian café and, judging by the girls’ Hollywood hair, the post-war Forties. Lan has hit upon the brilliant notion of transporting Shakespeare’s sexually ambiguous comedy of love and misunderstanding to France and post-war Paris.

The notion fits like a sleek, fashionable glove. Shakespeare after all peppers the play with French place-names. The post-war Paris of Jean Paul Sartre, Simone Signoret and Edith Piaf revelled in an atmosphere of philosophical speculation, melancholia and bitter-sweet romantic songs.