West End Archives - Helen McCrory

How Helen McCrory Shone, Even in a Haze of Mystery

On April 17, 2021April 19, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

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.

Continue reading How Helen McCrory Shone, Even in a Haze of Mystery

Interviews Print Media The Deep Blue Sea

‘Heart in her mouth’: Helen McCrory brings compassion to a tragic role in The Deep Blue Sea

On September 29, 2016April 12, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Helen McCrory’s Hester in The Deep Blue Sea

Peter Craven | September 29, 2016 | Sydney Morning Herald

Helen McCrory is at 48 one of the big-time actresses of the British stage, a classical actor who can burn up the stage in modern roles as well. You might have seen her as Cherie Blair with Helen Mirren in The Queen or as Narcissa Malfoy in the Harry Potter films, or on TV in Peaky Blinders.

In 2005 I saw her in the West End in what is arguably Shakespeare’s greatest comic role for a woman, Rosalind in As You Like It to Dominic West’s Orlando. McCrory’s voice was deep velvet and her wit razor sharp, a Rosalind for the ages.

National Theatre live broadcasts have shown her in The Last of the Haussmans with Julie Walters, and as a riveting Medea. Now she’s doing a modern classic, Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea.

“I worked with [Harold] Pinter on Old Times and when I asked him who his favourite modern playwright was he said Rattigan,” McCrory says. “How bizarre, I thought – how deeply bizarre. Surely they couldn’t be further apart in content and style?” Pinter with his menacing pauses, his uncanny ear for dark implications.

Continue reading ‘Heart in her mouth’: Helen McCrory brings compassion to a tragic role in The Deep Blue Sea

Interviews Last of the Haussmans Print Media Skyfall

Helen McCrory: ‘Now it’s 43, I call my body art’

On September 23, 2012May 9, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Why Helen McCrory is Happy Doing Bond and Baring All

by Tanya Gold | The Sunday Times | September 23, 2012

I have seen her twice before. Once on stage in The Last of The Haussmans, where she glittered, pulsated and stole the play; and again in a sluggish Q&A about the play, where she was nervous and prickly, out of her comfort zone. She seemed to fold into her chair, intent on playing a cushion, as the elderly female audience cooed over her co-star Rory Kinnear and semi-ignored her. She said things like: “It doesn’t matter to me how other people view my career.” When a woman asked her if she had received a gift she left at the stage door, she replied “Yes”, very coldly, and turned back into a cushion.

She is not like this today. She is excitable and joshing, playing my best friend. I am here to discuss her role in Skyfall, the new James Bond movie, although we don’t get far with that. She teases my tape recorder, booming like a refugee from Malory Towers — “Nice and loud and clearly, shall we?” It quickly becomes obvious that McCrory, who prepares obsessively for every role, chose acting, at least initially, as an act of control. I decide it is this Helen, the pilot Helen, who is in charge of all the other Helens — the cross Helen, the principled Helen, the funny Helen and so on. As a child, she moved around: her father was a diplomat. Storytelling, she says, helps “to make sense of your childhood — Africa compared to Norway compared to Paris. Everything is logical in that world of the play”. She has the otherworldliness of the British child brought up abroad, a kind of tidy cleverness that sometimes collapses into swearing, or shrieks.

She knows how good she is, which pleases me. I’m sick of actors saying how grateful they are, and how fame fell on them like a surprise boulder. “I often read articles where actors say, ‘I know I’m a fake, I’m just waiting to be found out,’” she says slowly. “I’ve never thought that.” Her voice changes, slurring from estuary when she is excited to RP when she is making a serious point. She swears constantly. Sometimes she sounds like Celia Johnson, sometimes like Ray Winstone. A waiter asks us to move, because there is a private party. “Okay,” she says. “We’ll move in a minute.” Exactly one minute later, she does. I wonder if she timed it.

Continue reading Helen McCrory: ‘Now it’s 43, I call my body art’

As You Like It

As You Like It at Wyndhams Theatre – Review

On June 21, 2005October 25, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

As I like it

By Nicholas de Jongh | June 21, 2005 | The Evening Standard

I like to be nicely shocked at the theatre, and David Lan duly satisfies by giving As You Like It a sharp but appropriate Gallic make-over. Here in high heels, highish humour and a slinky, little black dress, comes Shakespeare’s wittiest heroine, Helen McCrory’s flirtatious Rosalind.

She is first seen sipping red wine with Sienna Miller’s bland, blonde Celia, in a Parisian café and, judging by the girls’ Hollywood hair, the post-war Forties. Lan has hit upon the brilliant notion of transporting Shakespeare’s sexually ambiguous comedy of love and misunderstanding to France and post-war Paris.

The notion fits like a sleek, fashionable glove. Shakespeare after all peppers the play with French place-names. The post-war Paris of Jean Paul Sartre, Simone Signoret and Edith Piaf revelled in an atmosphere of philosophical speculation, melancholia and bitter-sweet romantic songs.

As You Like It

Mad About The Girls

On June 15, 2005October 25, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Forget Juliet: Shakespeare’s real women are in ‘As You Like It’, as Sienna Miller and Helen McCrory will prove

Paul Taylor | June 15, 2005 | The Independent

Rosalind in As You Like It is the longest female part in Shakespeare, and once the character gets into the Forest of Arden and into male disguise, she acquires a freedom of emotional manoeuvre far greater than that of any of the other cross-dressed heroines in the canon. She has been called the “consciousness” of the comedy, a compliment that would never be paid to Viola in Twelfth Night, say, or Portia in The Merchant of Venice.

The androgynous focus of desire when in masculine mufti, she also offers the supreme instance in Shakespeare of the way that men should rely on the superior emotional intelligence of women. It’s a plum role but clearly also a daunting one. In the courtship game that Rosalind, in her alias of Ganymede, plays with Orlando, she has somehow to be up to her neck in the scenario she stage-manages and at a critically perceptive remove from it.