Page 10 - Fujifilm Exposure_3 Michael Winner_ok

H elena Bonham Carter has tried long and hard to be a rebel without a corset after more than a decade of demure, tightly- laced roles. She’s cut her hair, played Woody Allen’s wife, performed brilliant- ly in both French and English, fallen in love with Kenneth Branagh on and off screen, been a shabby coal-miner’s daughter and will soon be seen on television as a young woman with the
debilitating motor neurone disease.
But ever since her film starring debut at 18 as the
doomed 16th Century, nine-day Queen, Lady Jane, tiny
dark depths. He was incredibly cynical and very much drawn to the less attractive side of human nature - the way people use each other as currency. I think we can all recognise that in some people and ourselves.”
Even though she still looks so young - apparently while making Margaret’s Museum she was able as a dare to get a child’s ticket for a local tourist attraction - she’s now 31 and blazing with a vivid vitality that must burn away her perceived innocence.
It seems, though, she has no skeletons in her cup- board, only period costumes. She’s still living at home although recently she bought an old artist’s studio round the corner. Her father, now a paraplegic, was a
prominent merchant banker while her mother is a busy psy- chotherapist who now reads her daughter’s scripts (for a fee) and collaborates on psy- chological portraits of her characters.
She is the great grand-daughter of the former British Liberal Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith and embarked on her acting career on a whim when at
only 14 she went out and got herself an agent. She was poised to take her Oxbridge entrance when director Trevor Nunn cast her as his Lady Jane in 1984.
Now, she reflects, “I need to remind people that I exist out of a corset. At 30 you care less about what other people think of you - not that you don’t care - and you care less about what you think of yourself.
“You get a healthy degree of self-acceptance and also a healthy realisation that life doesn’t go on forev- er in this business,” adds the eminently down-to-earth actress. ■ MARIANNE GRAY
Keep The Aspidistra Flying will open on November 21 and The Wings Of The Dove opens on January 2, 1998.
A Room With A View, photographed by Tony Pierce Roberts BSC, and The Wings Of The Dove, lit by Eduardo Serra, were both originated on Fujicolor Motion Picture Negative.
and elfin-like Bonham has been inexorably caught up in the pages of history. There was her mad Ophelia in Zeffirelli’s Hamlet and madcap Elizabeth opposite Kenneth Branagh’s ‘Baron’ in the stunning, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Then most famously, the Merchant-Ivory hero- ine in both A Room With A View and Howards End.
Carter, with her timeless looks,
A Face
A Face
For All Seasons
For All Seasons
In and out of the past with the thoroughly modern Helena Bonham Carter.
Take her two latest film roles. In Keep The Aspidistra Flying, which opened this year’s London Film Festival, she co-stars with Richard E Grant as the very 1930s Rosemary in an adaptation of George Orwell’s bleak comedy about Bohemian life.
Then it’s back to a turn-of-the-century setting play- ing for a change not the ingenue but the manipulative Kate Croy in Iain (Backbeat) Softley’s Venice-set film of Henry James’s novella The Wings Of The Dove, co-star- ring with Linus Roache and Alison Elliott.
“What attracted me to the role of Kate,” she told me, “and what makes it a difficult one, is that on paper, as described, she’s really quite a minx. I kept on think- ing it was the kind of part Bette Davis used to play - deliciously unsympathetic but alluring all at the same time. There’s a little bit of Kate in all of us. I’m partic- ularly fascinated by Henry James as he touches such
Photo: (main) Helena Bonham Carter in The Wings Of The dove and (above) with co-star Richard E Grant in Keep The Aspidistra Flying
EXPOSURE • 10 & 11