After living in Los Angeles and featuring in NBC show Life with husband Damian Lewis, actress returns for latest JK Rowling
Helen McCrory poses for a portrait shoot in London on March 10, 2008. (Chris Terry/Contour by Getty Images)
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…”