Helena Bonham Carter

Biography:

Helena Bonham Carter's career has been one long struggle against preconceptions and virus-like rumours. Many, particularly in America, believe her to be related to the Royal Family, and thus born with a silver spoon in her mouth - neither is true. Many more consider her to be the quintessential English rose, her pre-Raphaelite looks priming her for a lifetime of Shakespeare, EM Forster and Henry James adaptations. In fact, she's performed a huge variety of roles and, by birth, is actually far from pure-blood English. Only now, after her star-turn alongside Brad Pitt in Fight Club, her appearance with Steve Martin in Novocaine, and as Ari, an activist chimpanzee, in Tim Burton's Planet Of The Apes, has she come to be recognised for what she is - one of the UK's finest and most successful contemporary actresses.

She may not be royalty but, born in Golders Green, north London, on May 26th, 1966, Helena does come from classy stock. Her great-grandfather was Lord Asquith, liberal Prime Minister between 1908 and 1916. Her grandmother was Violet Bonham Carter, a renowned politician, orator and member of the House Of Lords (an excellent female role model), while her grand-uncle was Anthony Asquith, legendary English director of such classics as Carrington VC and The Importance Of Being Earnest. Yet, despite this exceptionally English bloodline, Helena's corpuscles are a heady mix, her father, Raymond Bonham Carter, a merchant banker by trade, having married Elena, predominantly French and Spanish - with a smattering of Jewish, Russian and Viennese for good measure.

It was Elena who made the first violent impact upon Helena's young life. When the girl was just 5, her mother had a serious nervous breakdown, from which it took her three years to recover. Upon her recovery, her experience in therapy led her to become a psychotherapist herself - Helena now pays her to read her scripts and deliver her opinion of the characters' psychological motivations. Five years after her mother's recovery, there was a more terrible familial blow. While holidaying in Greece, Raymond went deaf in one ear. He was diagnosed with acoustic neuroma, and a routine operation was carried out to remove the benign tumour. It went badly wrong. After 9 hours in theatre, Raymond, only 50 years of age, had a stroke that left him half-paralysed and confined to a wheelchair. With her two older brothers (both now bankers) at college, Helena was left to help her mother cope. She would later study her father's movements and mannerisms for her role in The Theory Of Flight.

Helena is not a natural exhibitionist yet, for some reason, her father's illness drove her to pursue acting.

Perhaps a sudden realisation of his mortality made her want to impress him quickly. She remembers thinking about becoming an actress when she was 5, and later wanting to be Kate Jackson from Charlie's Angels. She also recalls a visit from a family friend, a glamorous actress, and how impressed she was that both her brothers (and her father) were noticeably attracted to the woman. Attending South Hampstead School For Girls, Helena took a leaf from a schoolmate's book and, using money she'd won in a national poetry competition, got herself an agent and placed a photo of herself in a casting directory.

. Work would finally come in 1982, when she was 16 - though she had already begun to perform onstage. Now attending Westminster School, she got a part as Juliet in an ad for stereos. Then came a real break. Accompanying a schoolfriend who needed moral support, she went to an audition in Nothing Hill. This was for A Pattern Of Roses, based on KM Peyton's 1972 novel and to be financed by Channel 4. In it, a sick young boy uncovers a tale of disastrous young love from 70 years before, and finds himself haunted by the protagonists. Spotting Helena, the producers decided she would make an excellent Edwardian ghost and hired her - once they'd convinced her father that it wouldn't interfere with her exams. As a side-note, Helena was not a union member and, being as only one non-union actor could be used, another non-union hopeful was bumped off the bill. His name was Hugh Grant (learning little from the experience, he'd later also get dropped from Mel Gibson vehicle The Bounty).

Though still at school, Helena persisted with acting and, when a picture of her in the Tatler was spotted by renowned director Trevor Nunn, she found herself cast in Lady Jane. This was a classic historical tragedy, about Lady Jane Grey who, in the chaotic aftermath of Henry VIII's death, finds love in an arranged marriage, is placed on the throne of England, and is then usurped and executed. Helena's looks and natural reserve and enthusiasm served her well - she was excellent. This led to a terrifying test, as she was cast as Lucy Honeychurch in EM Forster's A Room With A View and, having hardly learned to act at all, was matched with Maggie Smith and Judi Dench.

A Room With A View was a huge success, rushing the release of Lady Jane which was shot before it. Helena would present an Oscar with Matthew Broderick, creating her own costume and introducing the world to what she knows as "shambles chic". Having won the part of Lucy, Helena had been prompted by her father to take this opportunity to launch an acting career. Consequently, she decided against going to Cambridge University and continued on. Tormented from youth by self-esteem problems (she would spend years in therapy), it was hard to stay confident. With all her friends at college, she felt terribly alone. Furthermore, she was already being dangerously typecast as a period drama heroine.

Keen to make a break from this, she took off to America and starred as Theresa, Don Johnson's junkie fiancee in Miami Vice. Away from the screen, she also sought stage experience, in 1987 appearing in The Tempest at the Oxford Playhouse, and then The Woman In White, directed by Sue Dunderdale at the Greenwich Theatre.

. This statement made, further wing-spreading proved difficult. A Hazard Of Hearts saw her alongside Diana Rigg and Edward Fox as an aristocratic girl gambled away by her dice-a-holic father: then came The Vision with Eileen Atkins and Dirk Bogarde: then a cameo in public school drama Maurice. She was a tragic heroine again, as Ophelia in Mel Gibson's Hamlet, then came another Forster adaptation with Where Angels Fear To Tread, this time with Rupert Graves and Helen Mirren. Then ANOTHER Forster, with the superior Howard's End, which won an Oscar for Emma Thompson. All very, very English - even the one where the Australian played the Dane.

Throughout, Helena continued to take what unusual roles she was offered, including further stage parts in The Chalk Garden at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford (89), Lorca's The House Of Bernardo Alba at the Nottingham Playhouse (91) and Beaumarchais' The Barber Of Seville at the Palace Theatre, Watford (92). She'd also tour in Arthur Wing Pinero's Trelawney Of The Wells (93), appearing alongside Michael Hordern, Jason Connery and Sarah Brightman in Brighton, Bath and at London's Comedy Theatre. Onscreen, she was the flamboyant, anorexic seducer Lady Minerva Munday in Getting It Right: she was the confused and fearful wife of Lee Harvey Oswald in Marina's Story (for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe): she even played a stripper, winning the heart of Rik Mayall in Dancing Queen. But there was no escape from period stuff - she just suited it too well - and next came one of the greats, Frankenstein (the book being one of the greats, not the film), where Helena revealed a quite stunning gothic look, only to have it spoiled when Robert De Niro's Monster literally knocked her head off her shoulders.

During the filming of Frankenstein, the star and director Kenneth Branagh was undergoing a painful separation from Emma Thompson. He and Helena got on well, and eventually began a relationship which would last till 1999. Unwilling to score any publicity or professional kudos from this, she would never talk about her personal life with Branagh, despite hundreds of journalistic proddings. Instead, she persisted in her efforts to depart from straight-laced period drama wherever possible. She was tortured by coal-mining disasters in Nova Scotia in Margaret's Museum: she did the complicated relationship thing in Portraits Chinois (speaking French, her mother's native tongue), which meant she couldn't play Desdemona in Branagh's Othello: she joined Rhys Ifans in a mismatched couple manipulated by the gods in the short A Little Loving: and she married Woody Allen in Mighty Aphrodite.

When, in 1998, she played her own grandmother, Violet, in a radio play, she did some research and discovered a postcard Violet had sent to her husband in 1911. It featured an odd-looking Italian hotel - by strange coincidence the one where Helena had stayed while filming with Allen.

. Now maturing rapidly as an actress, Helena could return to period drama confident that she could bring more power to her roles, and avoid the shrinking violet tag. She played Olivia in Trevor Nunn's production of Twelfth Night, took on George Orwell's Keep The Aspidistra Flying and, most notably, played Kate Croy in Henry James' The Wings Of The Dove. Here she was tremendous as a manipulative young women attempting to keep her fortune and also a penniless lover she's been forbidden to see. Once again, she was nominated for a Golden Globe and, as proof positive of her massive progress, also gained an Oscar nomination. She took her mother to the ceremony, rather than Branagh and is typically good-humoured about her defeat by As Good As It Gets' Helen Hunt, saying "I'd won for the first two syllables".

Finally accepted as an actress, she threw herself into out-there roles with a vengeance. There was the dark laugh-fest of The Revengers' Comedies, where she meets Sam Neill on Tower Bridge, both about to jump. Instead they decide to take vengeance on those who've hurt the other. There was the aforementioned Theory Of Flight where she played a victim of motor neurone disease who wants Branagh to help her be deflowered before her death. And there was Merlin (with Neill again), where she played Morgan Le Fey to Miranda Richardson's superb, hissing Queen Mab, receiving nominations for both a Golden Globe and an Emmy. In the meantime, she finally moved out of her parents' house, and got a flat in Belsize Park, next door to producer Nellee Hooper, famed for his work with Bjork. She also rid herself of a frighteningly obsessive stalker who once called her 16 times in one minute.

Now came a major breakthrough. Fight Club was her first blockbuster, her first "girlfriend role", as she calls it. Here she was the fabulously neurotic Marla Singer, who meets Ed Norton at a testicular cancer group and engages in an affair with Brad Pitt, in the midst of which she performs the loudest and most hilarious orgasm since Meg Ryan's in When Harry Met Sally - scandalous behaviour for an English rose. Then came the rough, Edinburgh-set Women Talking Dirty: the scary, animated Carnivale: and Till Human Voices Wake Us, where Guy Pearce returns to Victoria, Australia, and meets Helena, playing the ghost of a woman he once knew.

And there was Tim Burton's Planet Of The Apes. Here, clad in a hugely uncomfortable ape costume, she played Ari, helping out marooned astronaut Mark Wahlberg - quite evidently not trading on her looks (an occasional accusation - she did in fact model Yardley cosmetics, briefly, in 1995, but quit because she hated it so).

Then came Football, a short following a kid's obsession with The Beautiful Game, Helena playing his distracted, chain-smoking mother. After that came Novocaine, where she seduces dentist Steve Martin into prescribing her drugs, and pulls his normal life to pieces. While filming, back in 2000, having now split from Branagh after 5 years, she had a fling with Martin but found the 21-year age difference too much. Martin, who'd had thoughts of marriage, was devastated. Helena herself found herself in a new relationship fairly quickly. During the filming of Planet Of The Apes, she'd grown close to director Tim Burton. When he split from his fiancee of 8 years, Lisa Marie, just before the film's release, he took up with Helena. The couple would become engaged in 2001 and welcome their first child, a son named Billy Ray, two years later. The new arrival would be balanced by a sad loss when, in January 2004 her father finally passed away.

. From Novocaine, Helena moved on to The Heart Of Me where, in London in the Thirties, she was Dinah, the sister of Olivia Williams' Madeleine. Madeleine falls for Paul Bettany's Rickie and marries him, but Dinah falls for him too and has an affair, an action which haunts the sisters throughout their lives. Then came Live From Baghdad, with Helena starring alongside Michael Keaton, her boyfriend's original Batman, the two of them playing CNN producers in Iraq during the 1990-91 Gulf War, trying to scoop their rival networks while battling a cynicism that might allow the media to become the star of this bloody show. For her efforts she'd be nominated once again for both an Emmy and a Golden Globe.

Her next production would take her briefly back to period drama with an expensive TV biopic of Henry VIII. Ray Winstone would star as the titular king but Helena would steal the first half of the two-parter with her brilliant Anne Boleyn - independent, intelligent and bewitching, but also loyal, warm and amusing, and dignity personified at her own beheading. Very different would be Big Fish, her second effort with Tim Burton. This was a soft-hearted and fuzzy stab at magical realism where Billy Crudup tried to get to the truth behind his dying father's tall stories of his fantastical youth, stories featuring circus giants, a massive cat-fish and Rad Army talent shows, with Helena appearing (most impressively) as a witch in whose glass eye a person can see how they will die. She'd remain with Burton for 2005's mighty hit Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, playing Charlie's sweet and supportive mother, never complaining about her husband's inability to raise the family from squalor or the fact that her front-room's dominated by a big bed packed with bizarre elderly relatives.

Now a mother, of course, she'd find herself flitting between contemporary drama and high-class fantasy. Conversations With Other Women would see her bump into old flame Aaron Eckhart at a New York society wedding. She's married with a kid, he's got a hot girlfriend, nevertheless they circle one another, swapping innuendos and witticisms and we wonder whether they'll get it on. It was interesting stuff, the movie using a split screen technique to flashback through their lives and show the same scene from different angles, questioning the nature of love, maturity and responsibility, and the changing meaning of sex as time passes.

It was a far cry from her next two movies, both voice-overs and both big hits. First would be Wallace And Gromit: The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit where she was Lady Campanula Tottington, an aristocrat who hires Wallace and Gromit to provide security for her family's annual Giant Vegetable Fete. They like to protect the veg humanely, sucking rabbits from the ground with their ingenious Bun-Vac. A more violent approach is taken by Ralph Fiennes' despicable Victor Quartermaine who'd like to steal Helena's hand and her estates. Just as charming would be The Corpse Bride, Tim Burton's first animation since The Nightmare Before Christmas. Here Johnny Depp was set to marry Emily Watson, thereby appeasing both their ambitious families. But, practising his wedding vows in a cemetery (where else?) he slips the ring onto what he thinks is a twig and inadvertently bethroths himself to Helena, a murdered bride onto whose dessicated finger he has slid the wedding band. Naturally, she returns from the Netherworld to claim her husband yet this was no goth-fest, more an other-worldly love story.

Very worldly would be her first release of 2006, Magnificent Seven, where she'd return to hardcore reality in the true life tale of Jacqui Jackson, a woman struggling to raise seven children - three daughters and four boys, each of the lads suffering some kind of disorder, such as Asperger's or ADHD. It was interesting, informative and moving. Also based on a real life story would be Sixty Six where again she'd play a mother trying to cope with the needs of her progeny. This time she'd have a 12-year-old son whose bar mitzvah falls on the same day as the 1966 World Cup final, the boy fearing that the occasion will be ruined by everyone's obsession with the football. Communication is tough as his dad has OCD and no sense of humour but, after various traumas and cross-London car races (Richard Curtis was involved at the writing stage), all was happily resolved. Helena would enjoy the part immensely as it allowed her to draw upon her experience with the Jewish mums of Golders Green back in her youth. Another happy occasion would come in 2006 when she was asked to join Samuel L Jackson, Tim Roth, Monica Bellucci and Zhang Ziyi on the jury at Cannes.

Helena's next two projects would be larger and far more gothic.

First would come Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix where she'd take the place of a pregnant Helen McCrory to play Bellatrix Lestrange. A Death Eater, she'd be a right nasty case, condemned for torture and breaking the laws of magic and ever-faithful to the evil Lord Voldemort. Passionate and quite mad, Lestrange gave Helena a great chance to push the boat out, as did her next character, pie shop owner Mrs Lovett in her husband's screen adaptation of Sweeney Todd. Based on Stephen Sondheim's musical, which opened on Broadway in 1979 with Angela Lansbury as Lovett, this would see Johnny Depp as the titular barber, returning to London from Australian exile and swearing revenge on judge Alan Rickman, the swine who framed him, raped his wife and stole his daughter. Helena would revel in Lovett's awfulness as she backs her beloved Todd all the way, giving him lodgings and equipment and even suggesting a novel way to dispose of his victims. These two movies would give Helena her highest profile yet, a further boost coming from a new business venture, Pantaloonies. She'd started this in 2003 when she'd met clothing designer Samantha Sage at an antenatal clinic. Together they'd produce bloomers, camisoles, mop caps, highly chic old-fashioned designs, all hand-painted or embroidered, with a high percentage of profits going to UNICEF. Their first collection, Bloomin' Bloomers, would be launched at Harrods.

. Whether Helena Bonham Carter will rise to even greater heights in Hollywood is debateable. She jokes that her short-sightedness (she wears lenses, or glasses) has caused her to ignore many a high-powered celebrity when they've attempted to introduce themselves, thus limiting her potential for advancement. Also, she's quite clearly drawn to low-budget projects that interest her - not a characteristic of many superstars. But that's Helena. Having spent a decade and a half battling against that English Rose thing, she's not giving up the fight now, even though it's already won. The girl got good - there can no longer be any argument.

Dominic Wills