Helena Bonham Carter is tripping down a Hampstead street on a busy
bank-holiday lunchtime, a celebrity-spotter’s dream. In a sea of groomed
yummy mummies in smock tops, she looks a cross between BoPeep and Marge
Simpson with a tequila hangover; which is to say, she looks whimsical, retro
and ever so slightly louche. She has always been contemptuous of her
prettiness, has never believed in it; the mad hair and car-crash ensembles
have been her way of avoiding embarrassing flattery (she prefers teasing),
part of the armour she has employed since her first big role, when she was
cast, as a “terrified” teenager, by Trevor Nunn as Lady Jane Grey in 1984.
The voice, too, seems a disguise, so crazy-posh in its plummiest depths, you
wonder for a second if it’s exaggerated for a bit of fun. She has flakes of
mascara beneath her eyes, an air of having been up too late or too early
(probably both, since she is currently filming Sweeney Todd and has a
three-year-old son).
She strikes me as a woman who has hit her stride after a lot of false starts,
one who is enjoying being 40, a rare sentiment among those accustomed to
admiration for their dewy, youthful beauty. Bonham Carter’s six-year
partnership with the director Tim Burton, father of her son Billy Ray – they
are kindred spirits, with their gothic taste and aversion to combs – seems
to have given her the confidence that was her birthright. She is, after all,
the great-granddaughter of the former prime minister Herbert Asquith and a
member of a great Liberal clan. Or maybe she was just slow to grow up,
stalled by her closeness to her parents, with whom she lived in Golders
Green until she was 30, and by starting big-time acting young, and so
becoming an adorable, talented baby for various mentors. For chocolate-box
romantics, A Room with a View will always be her defining movie, but she has
spent the past decade escaping the shade cast by Lucy Honeychurch’s parasol,
and emerged as an actress in her prime. Clearly born to play schlock-horror
spoofs and clever bluestockings, Bonham Carter is metamorphosing into a
great English maverick, heading for a feisty middle age of which EM Forster
would be proud, and with more in common with her indomitable grandmother
Violet Bonham Carter than she cares to acknowledge.
Today, she is so happy with the sunshine and her boys, and whatever treat
rustles inside that Whistles bag slung over her shoulder, that she is almost
skipping. She is dressed in a 1950s-style sundress and pink fluffy cardigan,
with vintage shades; her hair is piled high in a bird’s nest studded with
blue velvet bows, the work of her best friend and movie hairstylist, Carol,
who has been with her since the earliest Merchant Ivory bouffants. “She is
the best person at making your hair look as if it hasn’t been washed for
years,” she gushes, as if that might be what anybody else required from
their hairdresser. Her hair is in character today, but you couldn’t really
tell. She also has the filthiest fingernails you’ve seen since primary
school. Like the hairdo, they are the result of playing Mrs Lovett – maker
of mud pies, and much worse – against Johnny Depp’s Sweeney Todd in Burton’s
movie, which is shooting in London. The odd couple live together in ahouse
around the corner, but, despite rumours to the contrary, it boasts no secret passage
between separate dwellings. “No underground tunnel,” she confirms, “though
maybe we should have a bridge of sighs. Tim is sighing a lot at the moment.”
It must be tough to stop being a couple on set, I say. She rolls her eyes.
“The problem is that we don’t stop. Tim sighs loudly. I
say, ‘What? What? What am I doing wrong?’ Johnny looks away diplomatically,
or starts dusting his razor overattentively. We’re both banned from
discussing the film at home. It’s number one on the list of commandments
I’ve written down.” Since they fell in love on Planet of the Apes, he has
cast her in four films, including Big Fish and Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory. “After this, I wouldn’t work with him again,” she hoots, lying her
socks off. Actually, her admiration for him seeps into every corner of our
conversation, and, having spent 10 minutes with her, you can tell they are a
good match: smart, alert and cackling with laughter at silly jokes. “Now I
have Tim, Johnny and Billy all doing poo-poo jokes together. What a
nightmare!”
For all her success, the early Bonham Carter seemed a troubled creature,
living at home too long, clearly devastated by her father’s stroke when she
was 13, falling in and out of relationships, including one with Kenneth
Branagh. She was always articulate and outwardly assured, but still a little
lost. Burton (and Billy) seems to have fixed that, and not just by making
her his muse. “It looks like a clever ruse,” she admits, “getting together
with a film director. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Tim is
unbelievably disciplined about employing me only if I am absolutely right.
For Sweeney Todd, it was like I had to be more right than anyone else; it
was ‘in spite of’, instead of ‘because of’, being his girlfriend. I know a
lot of actresses will say it’s because I was sleeping with him, but it’s not
true. I had to audition for Stephen Sondheim, for God’s sake! When it’s all
over, I’ll tell the whole saga of how I got the part. It was like being in
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? – so painful and so acute that Tim
said, ‘We cannot watch this programme. We are actually living it, and it is
hideous.’ ”
We are meant to be discussing her new film, Hans Canosa’s Conversations with
Other Women, a savvy two-hander, co-starring Aaron Eckhart, about a divorced
couple who are still in love and meet again at a wedding. “It’s about
closure,” she says. “It’s a requiem for a relationship. My character needs
to work out if she was right to leave him, and she does – she has moved on,
but he hasn’t moved on a minute.” There was a time when she seemed to crave
just this sort of role: modern, complex, sexual, mature. Of all those words,
the last is the one that makes her shriek: “I have never felt mature. Anyone
who knows me would agree ... Sure, I’m more interesting than when I was 20,
but sadly the parts get exponentially less interesting. This was an
exception.” At least age has allowed her to make her own rules: requests for
her to bare more than her soul for the camera are greeted with supreme
caution.
Billy was nine months old when Bonham Carter shot Conversations. She had
regained her body shape, but the sex scenes were written as “head-to-toe
naked”, and she refused. “Even then, I wondered if it was necessary for my
boobs to be on show.” She pauses. “Though it’s true that when people have
sex, they don’t usually keep their clothes on ... It was my idea to get
undressed under the covers. Otherwise, my character had to be naked and get
into bed, and I said, ‘Not if she’s self-conscious about her age! Certainly
not when she knows he’s now with a f***ing dancer!’”
In all her musings about film, its technical aspect seems firmly stuck in
mind. “We shot in two weeks,” she says approvingly of Conversations, “and on
video, so we could shoot for ever – with film, you are limited to 11
minutes.” Her interest no doubt derives from sharing her life with a man
whose business is light meters and special effects, especially on an
extravaganza such as Sweeney Todd. “This film has made me see that I am just
a cog,” she says. “Actors can get egotistical and want to use whatever prop.
I’m just as bad. ‘Ooh, Tim,’ I’ll say, ‘what about this?’ But if it doesn’t
help the story, forget it. I have been disobedient in the past, but I have
understood that if you don’t hit your mark, you won’t get the light or
you’ll be blocked.”
Sweeney Todd, his first musical, has been a high-pressure adventure for
Burton, spiced with the drama of the production being halted during the
illness of Depp’s daughter, now thankfully recovered. For its leading lady,
the breakthrough has been learning to sing. “One audition, I sung for four
hours, and Tim said, ‘No, no, that’s enough. Will you stop?’
I’ve had nine months of singing daily. Now I’ve got this skill, this
instrument, and it makes me feel finally like a proper actor. I feel more
self-respect.” That elusive quality is one she lacked in the past, leading
to “huge complexes”, including one about not having gone to drama school.
After A Room with a View, she visited a few establishments, including
Bristol Old Vic, where the intention seemed to be to break her down, then
rebuild her. “I thought, I won’t have fun here, so forget it. Anyway, I’ve
given up the regrets, and that is liberating. F*** it. Whatever.”
Her career took off from a single photograph. In 1985, Tatler was running a
feature on people who looked as if they came from a different era. Bonham
Carter’s cousin Virginia was to be the Titian-haired preRaphaelite. When she
dropped out, good old “Hels” was asked to step in. “It was only because I
had long hair,” she says, seemingly nudging herself to remember how lucky
that early break had been. “My whole career boils down to how Carol did my
hair on that shoot. For most of the 1980s, I was just ‘the girl with the
hair’.” She was keen to start work. After her father’s paralysing illness,
his youngest child felt she ought to have an independence and an income to
call her own. She laughs wickedly. “Besides, I thought, while he’s in
intensive care, he won’t care what I’m doing, so I’ll get an agent!”
In the close-knit Merchant Ivory troupe, Bonham Carter became the adopted
treasure, nicknamed “little thing” (in A Room with a View, Cecil Vyse calls
Lucy “little thing”). Was it a comfortable family? “No, it was eccentric,
Ismail never off the phone, and Ruth [Prawer Jhabvala] just typing, typing,
existing on coffee and sugar, the thinnest person you ever saw.”
In her mid-thirties, Bonham Carter sometimes sounded bored and disenchanted
with acting. It was all too easy to assume she was feeling suffocated by
period costume, but she says the malaise, now passed, was deeper. “I didn’t
think it was a serious way of making a living. Actually, I was never fed up
with those period parts: they are good roles for women, all leads. I think
the press got tired of me in them. It was unfair, because the dresses may
have been the same, but the characters were very different.” Did she feel
trapped? “Not really; it’s a myth. Directors don’t typecast you –
David Fincher gave me Fight Club. Tim never typecast me. The first thing he
said to me was, ‘I have a feeling that you ought to be an ape.’ Besides,
you’re always going to have an encapsulating headline – for me,
first it was ‘Posh great-granddaughter of PM’, which I’d been oblivious to.”
Her mother, Elena, always reminded her she was also half Spanish, a bit
Jewish, as red-blooded as blue-blooded; her father “pedantically” pointed
out she wasn’t a real aristocrat, since Asquith had once been a
down-to-earth Yorkshireman.
The highbrow Liberal clan into which she was born sounds chaotic: brilliant,
sweethearted, arriving to help her mother and breaking everything in the
kitchen because they were all so undomesticated. The party leader Jo
Grimond, husband of her aunt Laura, she recalls fondly as “a gentle giant
with a huge head, very deaf and somewhat remote. When we made family visits,
he tended to hide in the kitchen.” Her adored father, Raymond, who died in
2004, was the least political of the siblings. She has still to locate her
own social cause; though her cousin Jane, a Lib Dem peer, is “always tying
to enlist me”, she has so far wriggled free.
Nor does she lobby much for parts. Her last effort at being proactive proved a
disaster. She wrote a passionate letter to Peter Kosminsky, asking to be
seen for Cathy in his 1992 Wuthering Heights (the part went to Juliette
Binoche). “Actually, it was more of an essay on the whole of Emily Brontë,
and he said, you must come in. I was wearing dungarees – probably not
the best thing to wear to an audition for a romantic heroine. I was all
wrong, and he was fumbling around, and I said, ‘Come on! What is it?’
He said, ‘Um, I think you’re a bit dumpy, that’s all.’ ” She screeches with
laughter. “Luckily, I didn’t hurl myself into bulimia.”
Her great leap into the 20th century was Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite
(1995), in which she played a cool, unfaithful wife. “I didn’t feel happy in
the part; I wasn’t mature enough. She was very sophisticated, and I didn’t
really like her. I have to like my characters. I love Mrs Lovett –
she makes pies out of humans, but she’s fantastic!” After Allen, she went
back into a corset to play the scheming Kate Croy in The Wings of the Dove
(1997), which won her an Oscar nomination. “I couldn’t not do it, the part
was too good.” Whether consciously or not, she has now mastered enough
gritty or comic parts to counterbalance the implausibly pretty ones: a woman
with motor-neurone disease in The Theory of Flight (1998); the mother of
autistic sons in Magnificent 7 (2005); as a voice in the animated Corpse
Bride and Wallace & Gromit – The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Her next
project looks set to be Eleanor & Colette, with Susan Sarandon, the
story of a mentally ill woman campaigning to win rights over her medication.
Recently, A Room with a View was on television when the Burton-Bonham Carters
were at home, and she cringed while he laughed. Isn’t he charmed by the
vision of Edwardian femininity? She splutters. “He’s not charmed at all! He
just talks about my hyperactive eyebrows. For Mrs Lovett, he says, ‘Don’t
move your caterpillars; don’t move your hands.’ He takes the piss out of me
most of the time.” The irreverence seems to have been just what she needed,
yet, for all her late blossoming, Bonham Carter is still unable to watch
herself on screen. “I go into a massive depression. It takes four days to
recover, and every time, I say, ‘I’m giving up acting.’ I’m very
self-critical. I hate everything – how bad I look, how bad my
performance is. In acting, I’m trying to get away from myself, and when I
see the work, I think, ‘Oh no, after all that effort, it’s still me!’ ”
The only film she has been able to watch is Planet of the Apes, in which she
wears a chimp suit, a disguise she enjoyed more than all the wasp-waisted
constructions or even her own funky-fairy wardrobe; and one that taught her
something. “It’s the only film in which I can understand what people might
see in me. My eyes are quite kind. And quite spirited.”
As for her darling son, she insists he will not follow her into the industry
she half loves and half scorns, and intermittently plans to escape.
“Absolutely not – don’t go there, mate! He can be a lawyer or an
accountant.” Given little Billy Ray’s arty provenance, his celebrity
contacts and his parents’ collection of kitsch sunglasses, civilian life
seems somehow unlikely.
Conversations with Other Women is released on May 18
