The British star has been installed in the elite of the profession for four decades without giving up her lapidary opinions and her particular way of dressing and daring with all kinds of roles.
Helena Bonham Carter (London, 56 years old) is synonymous with period cinema, although the most remembered phrase of her career is the one she blurts out at Tyler Durden in Fight Club: "I want an abortion of yours." The actress is not part of the front page of Hollywood, but her face is recognizable by several generations of viewers. In a time when artists measure each of her gestures so as not to harm her career, she has never given up being herself and expressing her opinions.
And she has an opinion on almost everything. From her film debut with the ultra-British tandem Merchant-Ivory to her role as the mother of Enola Holmes, whose second part just premiered on Netflix, she has touched all genres and combined film and television with ease. She has also seen how her private life was analyzed in the yellow press and her style, the object of recurring ridicule. “A charcoal-drawn Victorian Gothic,” defined by the Irish Times. She and a woman without fear of controversy. She would say that she is fearless, in general. In 2023 she will premiere the new miniseries by Russell T. Davies (Nolly) and a movie with Anthony Hopkins (One Life).
A few weeks ago, some of his statements defending two friends who have suffered to a greater or lesser extent from the so-called cancellation culture (a term, cancellation, as resounding as it is doubtful since most of its supposed victims continue to work normally) have provided a few headlines. To the Sunday edition of The Times she declared: "Everything has turned hysterical, there is a kind of witch hunt." Her words have had much more impact than the reason for the interview: nothing less than having become the first woman to chair the National Library of London in her 181-year history. A trifle, it seems, compared to her views on Johnny Depp, a close friend, a partner in five movies, and godfather to the two children she had with director Tim Burton.
Depp has been "completely cleared", he said, referring to the actor's victory in the ultra-high-profile defamation trial against his ex-wife Amber Heard. The newspaper also wanted to know her opinion regarding the controversy over the alleged transphobia of which the writer J.K. Rowling has been accused for a few years. Carter blames Twitter: "Nobody can talk about ideas there, everything is polarized, it's the war," and adds another possible cause of the attempt to oust the writer: "If it hadn't been for her immense success, the reaction wouldn't be so disproportionate. There is a lot of envy and the need to tear down successful people. He apologizes, however, that the youngest actors in the saga did not position themselves in favor of the author which allowed them to become stars. "Personally, I think they should let her have her opinions, but they are very aware of her fans and her generation."
Controversial men from Helena Bonham Carter
Bonham Carter's career now spans four decades. He has worked with Woody Allen, Mel Gibson, Roman Polanski, Jeffrey Tambor, and Harvey Weinstein, all of them protagonists of S- of more or less intensity. “I never see anything in black and white. I think that people are multicolored, it is rarely a question of being the good guy or the bad guy. Weinstein was a bully, period. But not a full stop, really. He was a bully, a potential sociopath, and also a fantastically effective movie producer,” he states. The actress does not hide how important Weinstein was to her career. “He was very smart. There are many reasons why he was very powerful. He knew how to get you Oscar nominations. My two nominations are due to him. And he had great taste in movies."
In the Harry Potter saga, where she played the villain Bellatrix Lestrange, one of her fan-favorite characters (and which was not intended for her, but for the recently deceased Helen McCrory), she coincided with Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh. It was not the first time that they crossed paths: the three of them were protagonists of a love triangle that obsessed the British press in 1995 (Branagh broke off his relationship with Thompson to start one with Bonham Carter) and resurfaces every time Christmas puts on the grills Love Actually: Thompson has declared more than once that in the sequence in which she breaks down after discovering that her husband is unfaithful, she owes a lot to the pain she felt after learning about Branagh's relationship with Bonham Carter.
The romance with the British filmmaker lasted five years and shares some points with his next great love story. While filming the 1999 version of Planet of the Apes, she fell in love with director Tim Burton. "When we first met, even though he put me in a chimpanzee suit, I was well aware that he liked my face: dark, pale, tuberculous." At the time, Burton was engaged to actress Lisa Marie, also in the film. History repeated itself. Unlike what happened with Branagh, a relationship that never quite fit the public mindset, hers with Burton seemed made in heaven. Or in hell. The shabby style of both became a delight for the magazines. “They saw us as the crazy couple.”
Her highly personal fashion sense has made her a regular on worst-dressed lists and a prime target for the fashion police who police red carpets. In 2011, the Vivienne Westwood of her combining one shoe of each color was the talk of analysts, but Carter was not deterred. “Why can't you wear mismatched shoes? Who says we can't?" “Sometimes I get it right and sometimes I get it wrong,” she admitted. “But fashion is about having fun. Fashion has been hijacked by an industry that makes rules about what we can and can't wear and I feel like breaking them." Her attitude was rewarded by becoming the image of Marc Jacobs.
Burton and Bonham Carter made eight movies together. “But I never had a free hand because I slept with him, I had to do auditions. And that I gave him two children! ”, says the actress. In 2014 they announced their separation.
The actress believes that the scrutiny to which her relationships were subjected by the press is one of the reasons why Peter Morgan, the creator of The Crown, asked her to play the unpredictable and hapless Princess Margaret (a character who is Vanessa Kirby's first two seasons became the most fascinating of the series). Perhaps it also influenced the fact that few other actresses have rubbed shoulders with the real Margarita. Her uncle Mark Bonham-Carter was the princess's boyfriend. Although the actress tends to minimize her ancestry, she is the great-granddaughter of Herbert Henry Asquith, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom between 1908 and 1916, and there are quite a few aristocrats in her family tree. She prefers to talk about her Jewish roots and her mother, psychotherapist Elena Propper de Callejón, daughter of Eduardo Propper de Callejón, a Spanish diplomat who helped hundreds of Jews flee occupied France during World War II. "Everybody thinks I'm posh because I have three names," she lamented on Digital Spy.
