Tag: National Theatre

Categories Print Media The Deep Blue Sea Trelawny of the Wells Tributes

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

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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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Categories Print Media Theatre Tributes

Helen McCrory – Tribute: The Stage

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Categories Medea Print Media The Deep Blue Sea Tributes Uncle Vanya

How Helen McCrory Shone, Even in a Haze of Mystery

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She Was Unforgettable Onstage Playing Seemingly Serene Women Who Rippled With Restlessness

by Ben Brantley | The New York Times | April 17, 2021

Helen McCrory in the National Theater revival of Terence Rattigan’s “The Deep Blue Sea.” Credit: Richard Hubert Smith

Selfishly, my first feelings on hearing that the uncanny British actress Helen McCrory had died at 52 were of personal betrayal. We were supposed to have shared a long and fruitful future together, she and I. There’d be me on one side of the footlights and her on the other, as she unpacked the secrets of the human heart with a grace and ruthlessness shared by only a few theater performers in each generation.

I never met her, but I knew her — or rather I knew the women she embodied with an intimacy that sometimes seemed like a cruel violation of privacy. When London’s theaters reawakened from their pandemic lockdown, she was supposed to be waiting for me with yet another complete embodiment of a self-surprising life.

Ms. McCrory had become world famous for dark and exotic roles onscreen, as the fiercely patrician witch Narcissa Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies and the terrifying criminal matriarch Polly Gray in the BBC series “Peaky Blinders.” But for me, she was, above all, a bright creature of the stage and in herself a reason to make a theater trip to London.

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Categories Medea Old Times Peaky Blinders Print Media The Deep Blue Sea Tributes Uncle Vanya

Helen McCrory would have been the next Helen Mirren or Judi Dench

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The actress leaves an extraordinary body of work, but there is no doubt that she had so much more to give

The wonder for me about Helen McCrory – whose passing, at 52, is so cruel, so sad, such a profound and premature loss to the acting profession – is how relatively long it took for people to cotton on to her magnificence.

I was lucky enough to visit the Tricycle, north London one winter evening in 1995 and see her star as Lady M in Macbeth. In fact, of course, she wasn’t then the “draw” – here was, surprisingly enough, a Shakespeare production at a major off-West End venue renowned for its contemporary political work. It was an oddity from artistic director Nicolas Kent. Yet within the space of a couple of hours, I emerged with her name on my lips, and the surest conviction that I had set eyes on one of the greats.

Here was an actress who was so intense, so spellbinding, so caught up in every moment of every scene she was in that it was as though she carried a lifetime’s acting experience within her: but she was just in her mid-20s. Her flintiness illuminated every line it sparked off.  Rapt, I ended my review of that dark, sinister torch-lit night, referencing the sleepwalking scene, saying that “it is the sight of McCrory alone, scurrying restlessly round in the dark and hugging a single flame, that burns a lasting image of unstoppable evil onto your retina.”

Categories Interviews Print Media The Deep Blue Sea

Helen McCrory: ‘This is a woman’s private space, invaded by others’

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Revisiting The Deep Blue Sea

by Chris Wiegand | The Guardian | July 9, 2020

As the National Theatre streams a bold revival of Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea, its star discusses a potent mix of sensuality and torment

‘It has a beautiful wisdom and simplicity’ ... Helen McCrory in The Deep Blue Sea.
‘It has a beautiful wisdom and simplicity’ … Helen McCrory in The Deep Blue Sea. Photograph: Richard Hubert Smith/AP

Director Carrie Cracknell described one day in rehearsals with you as an “almost spiritual experience”. How would you define your collaborative relationship?

We first worked together on Medea in 2014. We took Ben Power’s new adaptation and delivered an all-singing, all-dancing production of a Greek tragedy set in the 20th century on to the massive Olivier stage in six weeks. So ours was a collaboration formed in the furnace. We worked together at breakneck speed. So when we came to work on The Deep Blue Sea, the task seemed much simpler.

I hope I speak for Carrie, too, when I say we now have an implicit trust and respect for each other. Carrie possesses a rare quality that all the best directors have: no ego. The best solution in the rehearsal room is used, she has no concern who it belongs to, just that the play is served. She encourages everyone to trust their instincts and never attempts to dominate but quietly edits, taking ideas and losing others. The Deep Blue Sea was one of the most profoundly happy experiences I have ever had in a rehearsal room. She has a gentleness and non-judgmental quality that make you feel you could do anything. I hope we have the opportunity to do it again.

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