According to the following Reuters article (October 6, 2008), Helena will be the Red Queen in Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland”:
http://www.reuters.com/article/filmNews/idUSTRE4960U120081007
by Borys Kit
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) – Anne Hathaway, who is generating buzz for her performance in “Rachel Getting Married,” has signed for a role in “Alice in Wonderland,” which Tim Burton is directing for Disney.
Helena Bonham Carter, Burton’s fiancee, also has joined the film.
The movie, which stars Mia Wasikowska as Alice and Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, will use a combination of live action and performance-capture technology to tell the classic Lewis Carroll story.
Hathaway is playing the White Queen, a benevolent monarch who is deposed and banished by her sister, the Red Queen (Carter), who has an affinity for crying out, “Off with their heads!” The White Queen needs Alice to slay a creature known as the Bandersnatch.
Hathaway starred as Agent 99 in “Get Smart,” and next appears in the horror thriller “Passengers.” “Rachel Getting Married,” an acclaimed drama in which Hathaway’s character disrupts her sister’s wedding, opened promisingly in limited release last weekend.
Carter, along with Depp, was seen last year in Burton’s “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.”
Edit to add: My fault, I thought the Red Queen and the Queen of Hearts are the same. So I changed the original entry (I deleted “aka. the Queen of Hearts”).
Here’s the Wikipedia entry for the Red Queen:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_(Through_the_Looking_Glass)
The Red Queen is a fictional character who appears in Lewis Carroll’s fantasy novella, Through the Looking-Glass.
With a motif of Through the Looking-Glass being representations of the game of chess, the Red Queen could be viewed as an antagonist in the story as she is the queen for the side opposing Alice. Despite this, their initial encounter is a cordial one, with the Red Queen explaining the rules of Chess concerning promotion — specifically that Alice is able to become a queen by starting out as a pawn and reaching the eighth square at the opposite end of the board. As a queen in the game of Chess, the Red Queen is able to move swiftly and effortlessly.
Later, in Chapter 9, she appears with the White Queen, posing a series of typical Wonderland/Looking-Glass questions (”Divide a loaf by a knife: what’s the answer to that?”), and then celebrating Alice’s promotion from pawn to queen. When that celebration goes awry, Alice turns upon the Red Queen, whom she “considers as the cause of all the mischief”, and shakes her until the queen morphs into Alice’s pet kitten. In doing this, Alice presents an end game, awakening from the dream world of the looking glass, by both realizing her hallucination and symbolically “taking” the Red Queen in order to checkmate the Red King.
Confusion with the Queen of Hearts
She is commonly mistaken for the Queen of Hearts in the story’s prequel, Alice in Wonderland, but in reality shares none of her characteristics other than being a queen. Indeed, Carroll, in his lifetime, made the distinction of the two Queens by saying: “I pictured to myself the Queen of Hearts as a sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion – a blind and aimless Fury. The Red Queen I pictured as a Fury, but of another type; her passion must be cold and calm – she must be formal and strict, yet not unkindly; pedantic to the 10th degree, the concentrated essence of all governesses!”
The 1951 animated film Alice in Wonderland perpetuates the long-standing confusion between the Red Queen and the Queen of Hearts. In the film, the Queen of Hearts delivers several of the Red Queen’s statements, the most notable being based on her “all the ways about here belong to me”. Both characters say this to suggest importance and possible arrogance, but in the Red Queen’s case it has a double meaning since her status as a Chess-queen means that she can move in any direction she desires.
