The Tamesis
Romantic Englishwomen by Richard David Story was originally published in the November 1997 issue Fashion.
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Finally, after centuries and centuries – since her debut as a sixteenth-century actress twelve years ago. Ms. Jane—Helena Bonham Carter has a character who, despite being set at the turn of the nineteenth century, is more than just another detail in another period drama. “I’d been wearing extensions for so long that I almost forgot what I looked like,” says Bonham Carter, who, in her slip dress, tight cashmere top and boyishly bobbed hair, is completely unrecognizable from the young woman she plays. dove wings.
Hair, corset, satin, suspenders, buttons and hat – she has become a cliché, an actress’s over-tufted velvet pillow. (The benefit, she says, of films with dresses and drab suitors “almost guaranteed I wouldn’t have to take my clothes off.”) Then the Woody Allen movies came along Mighty AphroditeThe film won Mira Sorvino an Academy Award and propelled Helena Bonham Carter into the twentieth century. But her vicious Soho second adulterous woman was just the beginning: dancing queen (so far only released in the UK), she is a stripper (“Pie with a Heart”); in Margaret Museumshe plays—and I quote her—a “snot-nosed, tearful whore.” This fall, Bonham Carter stars as a stuffy, poetry-loving London spinster (in Let the spider orchid fly): A victim of motor neurone disease, opposite new boyfriend Kenneth Branagh (in flight theory) and Kate dove wings. In this visually stunning and engrossing adaptation, director Iain Softley transforms Henry James’s difficult and cerebral novel into an elegantly modern, psychologically sinister tale of love and betrayal centered on Bonham Carter. Nestled among the living rooms of London and the canals of Venice, dove wings could earn the 31-year-old actress her first Academy Award nomination.
“I personally don’t think I deserve this,” said Bonham Carter, rather matter-of-factly, as she stubbed out her cigarette and plopped down on the couch on the afternoon of Dove’s grand send-off at the Toronto International Film Festival. “It’s not my best work, and as an actor you know these things intuitively.” Others may disagree, including Softelli, who said no one could express Kate’s “Machiavellian sense of indulgence and playful innocence” so exquisitely. He even said that it was “a tribute to how strongly we felt about having Helena that we were able to overlook the fact that she might have been viewed by some as a period piece stereotype.”
It’s weird that she got this far, look how Ms. JaneDirector Trevor Nunn discovered Bonham Carter – the great-granddaughter of British Prime Minister Lord Asquith – about fifteen years ago after seeing her in an advertisement for stereo equipment. “My confidence at the time came from immaturity and arrogance,” she said. “I was very academically strong and I regretted not going to college.” When Merchant and Ivory put her in Room with viewshe felt very isolated and even more insecure, which may explain why she still lives at home. Why did she do this? “Home brings a sense of comfort, continuity and proportion to my work,” one journalist suggested in an article Bonham Carter deeply loathed, which may have something to do with the fact that her father was paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair for seventeen years (her mother was a French-Spanish psychotherapist).
