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Categories Peaky Blinders Print Media Tributes

Peaky Blinders’ Cillian Murphy on Helen McCrory, the show’s beating heart

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Series creator and stars pay tribute to the woman who made it a phenomenon

Benji Wilson | February 20, 2022 | The Sunday Times

Family ties: Helen McCrory as Aunt Polly in Peaky Blinders
Family ties: Helen McCrory as Aunt Polly in Peaky Blinders
ROBERT VIGLASKY/BBC
On the face of it there is no more machismo-laden, gun-slinging, smoke-smothered, balls-out blood-and-thunder television show than Peaky Blinders — back next week for its sixth and final series. The between-the-wars Birmingham gangster epic’s signature shot is a line of men in flat caps walking down a smog-smothered street in swaggering slow motion. Lo-fi garage rock music blares as the men caress their tommy guns. The image speaks: this is man’s work.

So when Helen McCrory was told in 2012 she was going to be playing a character called Aunt Polly in what was described to her as a period piece set in Birmingham, her answer was typically blunt. “I said, ‘No I’m not.’ I thought I’d be standing there with a mangle and a fag hanging out of my mouth wondering when the boys would come home. Little did I know.”

Yes, Cillian Murphy as Tommy Shelby is Peaky Blinders’ hard-as-nails poster boy. But the premise of Peaky Blinders is a story of broken men returning from the war and trying to fit into society. And that society had consisted of women while the men had been away. As Polly says to Tommy in the first episode: “This whole bloody enterprise was women’s business while you boys were away at war.”

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Categories Peaky Blinders Print Media Tributes

Peaky Power

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The Formidable Shelby Women Remember Helen McCrory

by Cole Moreton | February 6, 2022 | YOU Magazine

The women of Peaky Blinders have assembled for our exclusive YOU cover story but, tragically, there is somebody missing. ‘I consider Helen to have been the heart of this show,’ says Sophie Rundle. In the hugely popular period drama, Sophie plays Ada, who, along with her four brothers, takes on the police, the IRA, the Mafia and the world.

peaky blinders women

She’s talking, of course, about actress Helen McCrory, who starred as the family’s matriarch Aunt Polly and who should be with us as the female cast members gather to mark the beginning of the sixth and final series, but who sadly died of cancer last April, aged just 52. ‘She died as she lived. Fearlessly,’ wrote her husband Damian Lewis, fellow actor and father to their two teenage children.

According to the Peaky Blinders story, the Irish-Romany Shelby children were abandoned by their father and brought up by their hard-talking, cheroot-smoking, gun-toting aunt, played with intensity and brilliance over five seasons by Helen.

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