Royal Shakespeare Company Archives

Helen McCrory in Medea at the National Theatre in 2014. Photo: Tristram Kenton

Helen’s McCrory’s death from cancer at the age of 52 has robbed British theatre and television of a remarkably versatile and charismatic actor and one of the great leading ladies of her generation.

In recent years, she had gained a cult following on screen as the ruthless Narcissa Malfoy in the final trilogy of the hugely successful Harry Potter film franchise, and as steely matriarch of the Shelby family, Aunt Polly, in five series of the BBC Television hit Peaky Blinders.

On stage, she performed with the National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company, at the Almeida and Donmar Warehouse, and in the West End. She was twice nominated for Olivier awards, winning a Critics’ Circle award for her punkish, feisty Medea at the NT in 2014.

Continue reading Helen McCrory – Tribute: The Stage

McCrory is throatily confident as Garance

by Matt Wolf | February 11, 1996 | Variety

Marcel Carne’s great 1945 film “Les Enfants du Paradis” is a hymn to actors, to the luxuriant power of art, and to France itself, whose spirit — the film was made during the German Occupation — remains as unvanquished as that of the simultaneously pervasive and elusive Garance, the courtesan who best embodies it. Simon Callow’s stage adaptation for the Royal Shakespeare Company is about a revolve, and a creaky one at that. Ten minutes in, and your heart sinks. Four hours later, you revolve out of the theater, dizzy and happy to get some air.

Robin Don’s calamitous turntable design is perhaps the most obvious failing of an enterprise that seems noble and foolish in equal measure. Callow is by no means the first to see in Jacques Prevert’s script the possibility of a stage epic, and what better troupe to attempt such a task than the RSC, which proved undaunted by heftier sources; Dickens and Hugo? In our time of abased emotion, why not restore to the theater the heightened sentiment that “Les Enfants” celebrates, folded into a narrative often compared to “Gone With the Wind”?

Continue reading Les Enfants Du Paradis at the Barbican – Review

Versatile and charismatic actor of leading stage roles

McCrory is throatily confident as Garance