Medea Archives - Helen McCrory

Danny Sapani Pays Tribute to Helen McCrory In A New Interview

On February 7, 2024February 7, 2024 By helenistic No Comments

Partnering with Helen in Medea

By Helenistic | helen-mccrory.com | February 6, 2024

Helen with Danny Sapani in rehearsals for Medea

In a new interview with The Telegraph, British Actor Danny Sapani , who is preparing for his role of King Lear at the Almeida, pays a lovely tribute to Helen. Sapani shared the stage with Helen in Medea at the National Theatre in 2014.

“It’s hard not to think of death even when you’re in your early 50s. When you hit 50, it’s like walking down sniper’s alley. All sorts of health issues come into play. Impending mortality feels present.” And he says that he still mourns the loss of Helen McCrory, at 52, “We knew each other before Medea. We were close, and I think about her a lot doing this. Working with her was a highlight of my career. She was meticulous about every detail and she changed the way I worked.”

You can read Sapani’s interview in its entirety in The Telegraph here.

Memories of Talking Medea with Helen McCrory

On July 3, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Remembering Helen McCrory

by Edith Hall | July 3, 2021 | The Edithorial

In early 2014 I went downstairs to reception and saw a tiny figure, in a hat worthy of the Peaky Blinders, sunglasses, loose trousers and enveloping anorak. She recognised me, I assumed from my website, waved and smiled. We went up to my office. That was the first of several sessions, for me enthralling, in which we discussed Euripides’ Medea in remarkable detail. Helen McCrory put an incredible amount of intellect and hard work into that staggering, prize-winning performance.

She was interested in the research I’d done into criminal psychology and the profiles of women who kill their children. Certain patterns recur in these tragic cases. The women are often of high intelligence and well educated; this crime is by no means confined to the poor and deprived.

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Playwright David Hare and Peaky Blinders Creator Steven Knight Pay Tribute to Helen

On April 27, 2021April 28, 2021 By Gingersnap4Helen No Comments

“She Lit Up the Screen”

by David Hare and Steven Knight | Radio Times | April 27, 2021

David Hare Section:

One Saturday night in 1995 I sat down to watch a Screen Two film on BBC2. Streetlife, written and directed by Karl Francis, was about a single mother in a caravan in Wales, struggling to provide for her young child.

Although the material was bleak – Jo kills her child because she despairs of her future – it was played with the most extraordinary humour and vitality by a young actor I’d never seen before. She wore a tiny mini skirt, sparked with brave life, and gave one of the most moving performances I’d ever seen on TV.

Continue reading Playwright David Hare and Peaky Blinders Creator Steven Knight Pay Tribute to Helen

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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.

Continue reading Helen McCrory: In Admiring, Awestruck Memory

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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