HOLLYWOOD — Helena Bonham Carter rummages through a hotel refrigerator in search of nuts and candy bars for herself and a famished visitor. The night before, she’d appeared on screen in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland’s U.S. press premiere as a big-headed tyrant with goo-goo eyes, swelled forehead, bee-stung lips and tiny waist.

But even without the bulgy brow, Carter in person is every bit as striking as her digitally manipulated Red Queen doppleganger.

Dressed in combat boots and a silk sliplike frock, the actress, wild tangle of auburn hair framing her pale face, studies an early Carter-as-Red Queen sketch from the Museum of Modern Art’s catalog of Burton’s artwork and laughs:

“Oh wow, that’s it, the early sketch. Tim said, ‘You’ve got to play the Red Queen because I drew you.’ It’s like, ‘Really, is that me?’ He goes ‘Of course that’s you, and you’ve got to play her.’ I said, ‘Then of course I’ve got to play the Red Queen, for Tim.’”

Carter has played a lot of roles for Burton over the past decade.

Previously, she’d stunned audiences as a thinking man’s sex symbol in period pieces A Room With a View, Howard’s End and her Oscar-nominated star turn in The Wings of the Dove. And 1999’s dark Fight Club featured Carter as Ed Norton’s twisted girlfriend. Then, in 2000, she met Burton on the set of Planet of the Apes. A couple ever since, Carter and Burton moved into adjoining Victorian townhouses in London and now have two children, Billy Ray and Nell.

Describing day-to-day life with a man known for his outlandish imagination, Carter says: “Tim’s actually a quite sane person who doesn’t like combs, and me too. We have quite a normal existence. People would be surprised at how banal we are. We watch [English soap opera] EastEnders on the telly and most of the time he’s very tired because he’s always working.”

Usually he’s been working with Carter. Burton hired her to voice his stop-motion title character in 2005’s The Corpse Bride, then shunned experienced singing talent to cast Carter opposite Johnny Depp in his movie version of the Stephen Sondheim musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

For Alice in Wonderland, which opens Friday, Carter materialized on one of Burton’s sketch pads in the form of the Red Queen and there was no turning back.

“I’m not really interested in sci-fi, but as far as the fantastical, I’m sure Tim has indelibly affected me,” says Carter, who also played the villain Bellatrix Lestrange in the last couple of Harry Potter movies. “I can’t really see the seam between him and me but I’m sure he’s influenced my sense of humor and viewpoint on things. Hopefully I’ve done the same for him.”

At home with Tim Burton
In Alice, Carter’s Queen rules her court with absolute authority. Does art reflect reality regarding life in the Burton-Carter household?

“Yeah yeah, I am the boss. The Red Queen is Tim’s revenge,” she jokes. “‘I’m the boss at home, he’s the boss at work. I do the cooking, and he does the fetching. I make decisions, and he goes, ‘Yes dear.’”

On the movie set, of course, it’s a different story.

“Tim does most of the talking and telling and Johnny and I go ‘yep, yep, yep,’” Carter says. “Tim does not like intellectualizing and I think he’s right. It’s one of the things he’s taught me because I overanalyze and start to make things more difficult than they need to be. Then again, I take pleasure out of analyzing things. He’s much more intuitive. Tim knows how to trust his unconscious and let things marinate. He’s very good at trusting his unconscious.”

Unlike most of Burton’s previous guy-centric movies, Alice in Wonderland puts its young heroine and the dueling diva queens front and center.

“It’s funny that Tim even wanted to do it because usually he leaves ‘girly’ up to me,” Carter says. “When he said he wanted to do Alice in Wonderland, I’m like, ‘Yes! This is one for me. It’s for Nell. This is definitely one for the girls.’”

Carter says she can relate, in retrospect, to the coming-of-age crisis depicted by Mia Wasikowska’s Alice. “I remember what it was like when I was 19 and just starting out — I was just terrified of being defined all the time, of being judged. I was very limited by caring about what people thought of me.”

That was then, this is now.

“There comes a point where you just go, ‘Ultimately, I don’t really give a fuck any more,” she says. Restating the sentiment with a PG-rated term borrowed from the Mad Hatter’s “happy dance,” Carter, mother of two, concludes: “What happens when you have a baby, for me anyway, is I didn’t give a funderwhack any more.”

HELENA BONHAM CARTER yawns, stretches out her little feet – encased in little black boots tied with little black ribbons – and yawns again. She giggles, takes a sip of tea, and fiddles with one of many gold fob watches around her neck. We’re in a suite at the Dorchester Hotel the day Alice in Wonderland premieres in London and Bonham Carter is on mischievous, if sleepy, form. The 43-year-old actress plays the bulbous-headed Red Queen in partner Tim Burton’s 3D gothic fantasia, but in pe

Today she’s the picture of high Victorian camp, which is how I imagine she dresses both for red carpets and cleaning carpets. Her heart-shaped face is crowned by a bird’s nest of hair that could only be rivalled in height and knottiness by Burton’s. Her dress looks like it fell out of Bram Stoker’s wardrobe into Vivienne Westwood’s hands. I’m guessing there are bloomers beneath those billowing skirts.

“I was Alice-like as a child, actually,” she says in that cut-glass accent that makes her pinched vowels sound as though they’ve been squeezed into a corset. “Quite precocious, absolutely. Dreaming out loud.” She stops to ponder, rubs one of her watch faces, and goes on. “The story of Alice is about finding out who you are. People are always telling her who she is, asking her to define herself. That’s kind of like today, everyone saying, ‘Tell us about you?’” Bonham Carter makes a face as if to say she just about tolerates the absurd business of promoting films in anonymous swish hotels. “It’s all Bonkersland.”

Ironically, bonkers is the word most often used to describe Bonham Carter. It’s her metamorphosis from Merchant Ivory English rose to Tim Burton black orchid; the way she dresses like a sexy Miss Havisham; the fact she and Burton live in separate houses, with outrageous reports claiming they are connected by an underground passageway lit by candles and patrolled by bats. Actually, their living arrangements sound sensible: they get to watch telly together and spend time with their two children, but she doesn’t have to tolerate his insomnia, and he can close the door on her constant chatter. “It works ideally,” she agrees. “I’ve got nothing but good things to say about it.” How do their houses differ? “He says his is very James Bond but it’s more Tim Burton, about as original as his films,” she says. “My house looks like Wonderland. I’ve got fob watches and clocks of different sizes, lots of black-and-white tea sets.

“I’ve always loved watches and keys and key-rings and keyholes. They fascinate me. And hats. And little doors. I’ve got little doors in my garden. And pigs. I wish I had a pig. ‘Bonham’ actually means ‘little pig’ in middle English. I’ve been thinking about getting a micro pig. Do you think I should?”

Thank God for Helena Bonham Carter. While other actors fawn over their co-stars and come over all earnest about the latest charitable cause, Bonham Carter is off on a stream of consciousness about pigs. The Red Queen, a deliciously nasty creation who Bonham Carter based on Elizabeth I as played by Bette Davis with a little of their toddler Nell thrown in, likes to use a live upturned pig for a footstool. And so, it seems, would Bonham Carter.

Why did Burton, whom she first worked with on Planet of the Apes, see her as the balloon-headed baddie? “I didn’t really understand what Tim meant by Red Queen,” she says. “Then I read ‘enter queen, has huge oversized head, very angry…’ and thought, ‘So that’s how he sees me’.” She laughs, as she does at the finish of most of her sentences.

“What was your question? Oh yes. I don’t look at these characters and think ‘villain’. I look at them and think ‘mentally ill people’. And I love mentally ill people. They’re the most interesting to play. I see Bellatrix Lestrange (her character in the Harry Potter franchise] as damaged, not evil.”

On set the atmosphere was “playful”, unlike when they worked together on Sweeney Todd and Bonham Carter, heavily pregnant, ended up nicknaming Burton Big Chief Little Patience, while he called her Little Squaw Running Mouth.

“Possibly it was less tense because I had to scream all the time as the Red Queen so I got rid of any tension,” she laughs. “I didn’t have a voice after midday and that was ideal for him. I just stayed silent. Perfect! He had a Nerf Gun, so he shot me routinely. I shot him back with a machine-gun lighting gave me. It was good fun.” Are they good at leaving their worries on set? “We have to,” she shrugs. “You can’t talk about things at home. He needs to get his head away, and I do too. We just watch the news in my house.”

What Bonham Carter is interested in is transformation. Since she started working with Burton, she has altered herself more and more. In Planet of the Apes she was a chimpanzee, in Big Fish she played an old witch with an eye patch, in Sweeney Todd she was a murderous pie-maker, and as Bellatrix Lestrange she wears falsies. Now, of course, there’s the giant head. It would be easy to attribute all of this to a reaction against her “pretty” days as Merchant Ivory’s poster girl, but there’s more to it than that.

“In my first conversation with Tim, he said: ‘I don’t know you but you were the first person I thought of to play a chimpanzee,’” she says. “He had this hunch that I like to cover myself up. He was absolutely right. It’s always such a relief not to look like me. That’s why I got into acting, to escape me. And that’s the frustrating thing with acting. You think you’re losing yourself, being somebody else, changing your identity. Then you look at the film and think, ‘It’s still me’.”

She loathes this feeling so much she avoids watching herself on screen. “I hadn’t seen Alice and had to dub it. I thought, ‘This isn’t so bad. Usually I get really depressed when I’m dubbing something, but it was OK because I don’t look like me.”

Why doesn’t she want to look like herself? “Johnny does the same thing,” she muses of her co-star Johnny Depp, who she and Burton jokily refer to as the director’s first love. “I know we’re both in it to get away from ourselves. We’ve got a healthy amount of self-loathing I guess, which sparks the whole escapism thing. We like covering ourselves up. We’ve got the same urges. Ultimately it’s more to do with escapism rather than reacting to perceptions of me. I don’t think I really form my behaviour in reaction to what other people think.” She chuckles, fully aware that she’s stating the obvious.

Bonham Carter, the great-granddaughter of Liberal prime minister Herbert Asquith, got herself an agent when she was just 13. Her father, a prominent banker, had suffered a stroke that left him in a wheelchair and she felt she had to help out, and strike out. It sounds as if she had an old head on young shoulders – like Alice, in fact – but these days the opposite is true. Perhaps Burton is her rabbit hole, the person who keeps her imagination fertile, her attitude non-conformist, her mindset young.

“Possibly,” she says. “I think it’s something to do with getting older too. One is much more relaxed. It’s about finding your own sense of self and not being what other people want you to be. We’re definitely a couple of big kids, and that ties us together. We’re the same age emotionally.” And what age would that be? “Well, it varies throughout the day,” she says. “Sometimes we can be old and wise, but really the oldest we get is about 12.”

When Tim Burton finally made the surprise proposal, Helena Bonham Carter was touched by how shy and befuddled he sounded. “He was so polite about it, and there were so many hesitations,” Bonham Carter said. “He said, ‘Would you consider, um, possibly, perhaps — but only if you want to — um, anyway, would you play the Red Queen?’ ”

Bonham Carter, who has a nine-year romance and two children with Burton, giggled as she recounted the moment when she was invited to take on the royal role in “Alice in Wonderland,” the highly anticipated Disney film that opens Friday.

“It was like a proposal of marriage,” said the 43-year-old actress. Bonham is routinely misidentified as Burton’s wife.

“I was doing ‘Terminator Salvation’ at the time, and when he asked me, I was really flattered. It was a complete surprise! I know people think it’s disingenuous when I say that, but it’s true. They won’t understand this, but each time [he has a film], I truly don’t expect Tim to ever want to work with me again.”

That — like the shrinking potion in “Alice” — is a bit difficult to swallow. It will be 25 years ago this December that Bonham Carter had her career breakthrough in the role of Lucy Honeychurch in “A Room With a View,” and she has put together an eclectic list of credits with films such as “The Wings of a Dove” (which earned her an Oscar nomination), “Fight Club,” Franco Zeffirelli’s “Hamlet” and two “Harry Potter” films (with two more coming). Then, of course, there are movies she has made with Burton — “Alice” is the sixth since 2001, and in that span she has been a talking simian (”Planet of the Apes”), a moldering, undead woman (”Corpse Bride”) and, now, in “Wonderland,” a shrill queen with an abnormally swollen skull.

“I personally find it especially flattering that he tends to deform me in every movie,” Bonham Carter said. “But my mother and everyone asks me, ‘What is it with you and him?’ But that’s the point of acting isn’t it? It’s all dress-up.”

This time, the dress-up adventure is a surreal jaunt through Wonderland, in which Johnny Depp is the Mad Hatter, newcomer Mia Wasikowska handles the title role, and a deep roster of British actors (among them Alan Rickman, Michael Sheen and Stephen Fry) give voice to the unsettling animal kingdom on the other side of the rabbit hole.

No one has more memorable scenes, though, than Bonham Carter, whose role is a heady one, to say the least. A special camera and digital wizardry were used to magnify the star’s head, and the effect is a bit jolting to watch. In the plot, the queen’s monstrous noggin makes her a freak even by Wonderland’s standards.

For the record, Burton didn’t mention the major-league melon when he made his sweet proposal. “I learned that when I read it in the script,” Bonham Carter said with mock distress. “Oh, a huge head? I see, lovely.”

The film is a mix of live-action performance, green-screen motion-capture work and pure animation, which made for a dizzying amount of computation, crisis control and collaboration from Burton’s team. On the set, for instance, someone had to keep track of where the Red Queen’s mega-cranium would be in relation to doorways, furniture and other actors.

“The queen’s head was something we had to be careful to account for all the time,” visual-effects supervisor Ken Ralston said. “We had to remind people to back away from Helena in their scenes to give her head enough room.”

Burton said the key to the Red Queen was to make sure she wasn’t entirely evil or predictable and that her rivalry with her normal-headed sister, the White Queen (played by Anne Hathaway), would draw in the audience. He also tapped into some startling real-world inspirations for his bellowing Red Queen.

“In a lot of children’s literature and other literature, it’s kind of the same thing over and over — there’s good queens and bad queens, and here you have that, but the elements are a bit blurred,” Burton said. “Everybody’s weird and has weird qualities to them [in Wonderland]. She’s kind of a mixture. When I look at her now, she reminds me of pictures I’ve seen of Leona Helmsley. There’s a tiny bit of elements of my mother in there too, for some strange reason. And Helena brings her own things to it too.”

Linda Woolverton, the screenwriter for “Alice,” says the Red Queen grew up with a tumor in her head, which, in Wonderland’s version of physiology, made her head vast. “Linda told me it also made the queen emotionally volatile and arrested in her development,” Bonham Carter said with something close to sympathy. “We have a 2-year-old daughter, Nell. There are some similarities.”

Bonham Carter says some moviegoers will be surprised to learn that this new film is more like a sequel to Lewis Carroll’s familiar tales of Alice than a remake of, say, the 1951 Disney film or an updating of the many stage productions through the decades.

“Tim has changed things, and some purists will just slit their wrists when they see it,” she said, chuckling at her own gruesome imagery. “It’s all very invented, very new with this film and with good reason. The original Carroll stories are in fact very episodic — there isn’t a lot of huge narrative or dramatic drive. The story that Linda Woolverton invented is a mixture, it’s stolen from both [books by Carroll] but given a real context and a story and a purpose for the whole dream to occur.”

Bonham Carter says she doesn’t remember her own first encounters with Alice as a child. The Carroll images seemed more ambient in childhood.

“She’s so been around,” Bonham Carter said. “She’s definitely mythic. I can’t really remember how I first came to the story. I’ve always just had random impressions of it, the symbols and imagery, they’re just stuck with me. They’ve always entranced me — like the door and the keyhole and the ‘drink me’ potion and the ‘eat me’ cake.
“What is it about Alice? Why do we respond to it, and why does it still captivate us?”

Bonham Carter said an intriguing resonance of Carroll’s classic tales was the self-awareness that Alice had as she meandered through the exotic absurdity of Wonderland.

“She knows she’s in a dream, and we all know that feeling,” the actress said. “And the changing of size, there’s something in that too, the way children feel in an adult world or the way they fantasize about growing large and visible or to shrink away and be away from it.”

Bonham Carter’s early career had so many period pieces (”Lady Jane,” “Howards End,” “Where Eagles Fear to Tread,” etc.) that she was viewed as a “corset queen” and, with some sourness, noted that she might have considered having some ribs removed to better handle the wardrobe demands of typecasting. Now, though, with Burton and the “Potter” influence, she has taken a sharp turn into the world of fantasy and special effects. She is still leery, though, of letting technology get top billing above story and acting.

“I haven’t seen too many 3D movies, for instance, and I don’t think they all work that well, but I think with this one, with ‘Alice,’ it’s a perfect marriage of 3D and subject matter. I think with a lot of the 3D films, it’s a bit gratuitous. But with this story, you have all the shrinking and changing of size so there’s an opportunity to use the technology in an interesting way.”

The technology does have some negative side effects though. Burton, it turns out, can’t really see his beloved the same way he used to. “Oh, it’s true, I can’t even look at Helena anymore because now her real head just seems like a small orange,” the director deadpanned. “It’s like she’s got some shrunken head. It’s sad.”

by Lynda Gorov

Bonham Carter embraces her roots in ‘Sixty Six’ role

Helena Bonham Carter is in bed, propped up against the pillows, covered from ankle to neck by a Victorian dressing gown.

OK, that last part isn’t true. It’s just the image I have of her over the telephone from Albuquerque, where she’s filming the latest installment in the “Terminator” franchise. That is, it’s the image until she gets comfy and gets going.

Unexpected new information about the Oscar-nominated actress (”The Wings of the Dove,” 1997): She’s crazy for scrap-booking, a hobby mostly unknown in England; she’s got a bit of a mouth on her; and, translucent skin and Merchant Ivory movie credentials aside, she’s no corset queen. Turns out she’s Jewish on her mother’s side.

That last bit is actually relevant, in that her latest movie, “Sixty Six,” has her playing a classic Jewish mother (well, in this case, mum). Initial reaction (mine) aside, it’s in fact not the most against-type casting since Melanie Griffith pretended to be a Jewish/Irish secretary/spy in 1992’s “Shining Through.” Bonham Carter actually describes her own heritage as “Jewish, Catholic, mongrels, paradoxical.”

“My mother was triumphant: ‘You’re finally playing your roots instead of the English rose,’ ” she said. “Still, it was a very fine line not to go completely over the top.”

The “true . . . ish” story of “Sixty Six,” as both the background notes and Bonham Carter describe it, belongs to director Paul Weiland who, presumably, was an impossibly geeky boy on the cusp of his bar mitzvah in 1966. In the movie, his alter ego is 12-year-old Bernie Reubens, who decides that the only way to make his presence known and to stop being the local punching bag is to have the biggest, best coming-of-age party possible.

There’s a catch, of course. Bernie’s bar mitzvah is scheduled for the same day as the World Cup Final. England starts playing better than ever. Bernie’s parents, Manny and Esther, insist the team will never make it through. They refuse to reschedule. But as any soccer fanatic can tell you, England has won the cup exactly once – in 1966. The entire country was riveted. Bernie undergoes his rite of passage with nary a guest in sight.

Bonham Carter, 42, came naturally to the role of mom. She’s got two kids herself – a little boy, almost 5, and a girl who turns one in December – with writer/producer/director/fantastical filmmaker Tim Burton. Yes, they do have an Oompa Loompa or two in their house (”Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” 2005). Not surprisingly, it’s the most fun house on their London block, even if it’s actually two houses connected by a bridge.

“[Our son] is now into monsters, thank god, so they’re kind of on the same level now,” Bonham Carter said. “There are the usual elements of fantasy, plus we have all the props. The psychiatrist’s oversized chair, dead Oompa Loompas. The night nannies were freaked out by them. It’s . . . different. We’ve got daddy’s toys, mummy’s toys, a very delicate animatronic squirrel. The kids do like to come over.”

For his part, Gregg Sulkin, making his film debut as the woebegone Bernie, could not believe he was being cast opposite the witch Bellatrix Lestrange from “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” or the hot anti-heroine from “Fight Club.” He grew up on Bonham Carter, so to speak, and there he was, having been talked into the tryout by a cousin just two months after his own bar mitzvah at Israel’s Wailing Wall, about to perform alongside someone who has been a staple of British film since before he was born. (He was so green that he had to ask what that thing hanging over his head was. It was a microphone.)

“When I knew she was doing it, it was a big shock, basically,” said Sulkin “In England, she’s a very big actress, and when I found out she was playing my mum, I thought that such a big actress wouldn’t talk to me. But she was very friendly. She gave me a lot of advice. She and Eddie [Marsan], who plays my dad, were like my parents on set.

Sulkin offered that he is Jewish, “like Helena. . . . Well, she’s half. I don’t think a lot of critics knew when she was getting the part and didn’t believe she could pull it off. But we both had to put it on a little bit.”

In real life, at least from her hotel bed, where she lets slip some details about her “Terminator” character, then lets loose with some choice words about her lapse, she doesn’t seem to be putting it on at all. She’s registered under her own name. She’s thrilled to have located an Anthropologie clothing store. And she’s hoping to find a local store that sells scrapbook supplies. (”I’m mad on it,” she says of her hobby, and diligently writes down and repeats back the name of a website as devoted to it as she is.) She’s also hoping to track down something called Z-CoiL shoes, since she’s “a big fan of shoes that give you some height with comfort.”

That’s her current life, and she’s a bit beyond the “Sixty Six” Esther Reubens character, as the film debuted in England in 2006. Since then there’s been another “Harry Potter” and now a third in post production. She did Burton’s “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.”

And now there’s “Terminator Salvation,” scheduled for spring 2009 release, a relatively short shoot in which she has a small role as Serena, a villain. And then, “They just called me for this. It’s a bit worrying, I guess, just to be asked to play a sociopath. It’s s interesting to be called a bit off. It’s sort of natural casting.”

She’s equally unvarnished on the subject of how “Sixty Six” came about. Director Weiland, at his 50th birthday party, told the story of another party that he had given 37 years prior that no one attended. Eighteen months later, Bonham Carter was asked to play Esther. She immediately hired a voice coach and went about meeting the actual Esther, now in her 80s.

Even though she’s a mother herself, the mum role did surprise Bonham Carter a wee bit, although she doesn’t sound at all upset about playing her age. Her fan club, after all, now spans several generations. Depending on which movie they’ve seen when, people either consider her aloof in a period piece sort of way, sexy-charming in a bad girl kind of way, or just plain scary in a played-a-witch-in-the-wildly-popular-Potter-series way.

“With a movie like ‘Sixty Six,’ you’re like, ‘This is the way to go,’ ” she said. “There are fewer leads, but I’m definitely having more fun. I always wanted to be a character actor. It suits me given what has happened in my life. I wouldn’t want to be working like I did the first 20 years. I can be with my babies. It’s just a discovery of a different self, which is the living bit, which I didn’t do from 18 on when I was working pretty consistently.”

Plus, there’s the end to that phony could-this-corset-be-any-tighter image.

“It’s always puzzled me anyway,” Bonham Carter said. “I couldn’t look less English. I’ve got dark, curly hair. And now I’m 42; god knows that English rose has definitely wilted.”

by Frances Cronin

Helena Bonham Carter and Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood were winners at the Evening Standard British Film Awards.

Helena was named best actress for her roles in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and Conversations With Other Women.

Helena said it was “bizarre and amazing” to win for her first singing role.

But she admitted she is not a fan of awards ceremonies.

“I think awards should be abolished for a few years but here I am standing at a ceremony.

“They cancel each other out because there are so many of them and they come round too soon and it is a frock show.

“To be honest I was so relieved not to get nominated for anything but this because there wasn’t a frock to organise, any press to do. I think there’s just too many to be honest.”

Helena Bonham Carter and Daniel Day-Lewis led the ranks of movie talent honoured at the Evening Standard British Film Awards last night.

Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead, who wrote the score to Day-Lewis’s performance in There Will Be Blood, the teams behind the Ian Curtis biopic Control and the Ian McEwan adaptation Atonement were among the other winners.

Bonham Carter, 41, accompanied by her partner – and director – Tim Burton, was named best actress for her performance as a Fleet Street piemaker in his stunning version of the Stephen Sondheim murder musical Sweeney Todd.

The judges also cited her performance in Conversations With Other Women.

The north London star said she was “chuffed” to have been honoured for both.

“I’m pleased about Conversations because that was made in 13 days and cost about $400,000 [£200,000] and it was a beautifully written part but I thought about four people had seen it,” she said.

“It vindicates your choice in things. There are very few well-written parts for over-40-year-olds.”

Mrs Lovett in Sweeney was also a fantastic part but it had been risky, relationship-wise, working with Burton – with whom she became pregnant with their second child while filming.

“But it’s great because people who have never heard of Sondheim keep on saying they love it. I had two great parts – I had a great year.”

Stephen Frears, who directed 50-year-old Day-Lewis in his early role in My Beautiful Laundrette, accepted the best actor prize on his behalf. “He’s just very, very good and a nice chap,” he said.

Jonny Greenwood, 36, guitarist with Radiohead, was accompanied by band member Thom Yorke to the winners’ dinner as his wife Sharona is expecting their third child within days.

He admitted There Will Be Blood director Paul Thomas Anderson – a massive music fan – had to talk him into writing the score to the intense drama about an American oil prospector.

Greenwood missed out on an Oscar nomination because some of the music included work with the BBC Concert Orchestra not written specifically for the movie. That did not matter, he said.

“The kick is about having an empty room and mics and musicians-That’s when it’s exciting. And then seeing it transformed into being put to images.”

He was proud to have won an Evening Standard award because of the awards’ long tradition, he said.

Control, the story of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis who killed himself at 23, was the other double winner. Anton Corbijn, the director who was formerly a rock photographer, said: “I’m very chuffed that my first film found a place in people’s hearts.”

Matt Greenhalgh, Control’s 35-year-old screenwriter, took the best screenplay prize against competition from veterans Ronald Harwood and Harold Pinter for what was his firstmovie script. He said: “I lucked out twice for this. One, I wrote the Ian Curtis story and second, Anton filmed it.”

Paul Webster, one of the producers on Atonement, accepted the prize for technical achievement on behalf of Jacqueline Durran, its costume designer, Sarah Greenwood, production designer, and Seams McGarvey, cinematographer.

He said: “It’s really satisfying they were all honoured. When you work with Joe [Wright, the director] he creates a team.”

John Carney, the writer/director of the quirky Dublin-set movie Once about a songwriter and an immigrant, was most promising newcomer.

The special award named in honour of the late Evening Standard critic Alexander Walker went to Julie Christie. Derek Malcolm, Walker’s successor, said of her: “Not many screen actresses even aspire to as long a career as Julie Christie.”

The winners were chosen by film critics in December. They were Derek Malcolm and Charlotte O’Sullivan of the Standard, Tim Robey of the Daily Telegraph, James Christopher of The Times and Catherine Shoard of the Sunday Telegraph. Their choices have been followed by a string of awards and nominations.

Evening Standard editor Veronica Wadley, who hosted last night’s ceremony at The Ivy, said: “They were on to the winners very early on.”

by John Hiscock

THE GORE OF SWEENEY TODD WAS THE LAST THING THAT HELENA BONHAM CARTER NEEDED WHILE PREGNANT.

Things have been a bit busy lately in the Bonham Carter household. Helena has been celebrating the release of her new film, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street, which has garnered rave reviews, picked up two Golden Globes and earned Johnny Depp a Best Actor Oscar nod.

All this comes shortly after the actress gave birth to an as-yet unnamed daughter on December 15, her second child with her partner and Sweeney Todd director Tim Burton. Being pregnant during filming caused a few continuity problems and Helena reckons cinemagoers will be able to spot them, thanks to the fluctuating size of her boobs.

“The film was shot out of order, so sometimes I’ve got my normal little tangerines and other times I’m much bigger,” she smiles. “The costume designer knew instantly what was happening because it was unmistakable.”

In the classic slasher-horror-musical, Helena plays Mrs Lovett, who makes meat pies out the victims of the Demon Barber, played by Depp.

Meeting for a chat in a London hotel, Helena, 41, joked that the gory movie might have had an effect on her baby. “I expected it to come out with a little razor in its hand, or with its hands over its ears,” she laughs. “But there were happy hormones around even though I was working long hours.

“I’m convinced that whatever state you’re in during your pregnancy has a huge influence on the baby’s personality – so I hope we haven’t produced a little serial killer!”

Because she and Burton – whose films include Batman, The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow and Charlie And The Chocolate Factory – are off-screen partners, Helena had to work twice as hard to convince people she was worthy of the role.

“I had to audition like everyone else,” she says. “I knew the score so I sang several songs – until Tim told me to shut up.”

To her relief, Burton gave her the nod, as did the show’s composer, Stephen Sondheim. Then Helena had to spend three months with a singing teacher to learn to sing properly.

“We realised it would have been pretty hideous if Tim hadn’t wanted me,” she admits. “We knew some people would think he had cast his girlfriend because it was an easy choice, but it was just the opposite because it was a potential disaster.

“I knew I had to be right on the money because it would be awful for me to be in the film and not be up to scratch. I’d never really sung before so it was quite a tall order to learn how to sing in three months.”

Filming was also tough for Helena in her delicate physical condition.

“There were lots of human body parts and blood around,” she grimaces. “By then, I was suffering from morning sickness, so all that combined left me wanting to sit down most of the time.”

In addition, Burton was sometimes a tough taskmaster.

“It was quite hard and we had certain stresses working together,” Helena admits. “I think I talk too much for his liking, but he should have given me more compliments.”

The pair have had an unconventional relationship in the six years since they met on the set of Planet Of The Apes, living in separate but adjoining houses in North London.

Whenever Helena wanted to play with their four-year-old son Billy-Ray, she popped next door to Burton’s house. And when Tim, 49, fancied a cup of tea or a bite to eat, he’d pop round to use Helena’s kitchen. Now, they’ve simplified things by unifying the properties.

“We couldn’t keep on going in and out of each other’s houses,” says Helena, “so now it’s just one strange house which has no co-ordination. My part is very tasteful and girlie, while Tim’s is quite eclectic because he’s got a more modern taste.”

But now Helena thoughts are turning back to work and next on her schedule is reprising her role as the conniving, evil Bellatrix Lestrange in Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince.

“It’s going to be interesting,” laughs Helena, “because I don’t think I’m going to feel up to getting on a broomstick and lactating at the same time.”

And she confirms that the little baby girl still hasn’t been named yet. So, Indiana Rose is a hoax.

The Sweeney Todd star talks to Nicola Christie

There aren’t many parts that require singing, baking and gazing at Johnny Depp all at the same time. Maybe that’s why Helena Bonham Carter is looking so happy. “It’s an absolutely great part,” she admits. “But I had to fight for it.”

Lady Lovett, maker of the finest pies in London, is a Lady Macbeth of the musical stage who wills the man she yearns for, a barber by the name of Sweeney Todd, to cut the throats of his customers in order to provide a cheap and easy filling for her pies. The show, written by Stephen Sondheim, sent audiences wild when it opened on Broadway in 1979. Now it’s causing similar excitement in movie-land, this week garnering a Golden Globe for its lead actor Johnny Depp and one for Best Musical too.

We meet during shooting, in Mrs Lovett’s dressing room at Pinewood studios. On the way in, I’ve bumped into an alarming number of body parts – severed heads, hands with thumbs missing – illustrative of the havoc that Bonham Carter is called upon to unleash in the film. There are plenty of pots of red gloopy paint on standby, too, waiting to be slopped all over the screen.

I ask how she’s enjoying herself, back on set with Depp, Tim Burton’s other great muse, and godfather to her and Burton’s four-year son Billy. “He’s great, we’re having a brilliant time.” But what about her director? How does that work? “I’ve learnt not to talk so much and basically obey him, because he’s the chief at work.”

It was during the shoot for The Planet of the Apes remake in 2001 that Bonham Carter and Burton locked fates. He told her she’d make a perfect monkey, and the two have lived happily in Hampstead ever since, recently becoming the proud parents of a baby girl, born just before Christmas.

“It can be difficult living and working together. It depends on the day. Sometimes we revert to a couple and our relationship at home on set, which isn’t helpful.”

They can’t get it too wrong too often, though, as they’re still working together. Their past collaborations include Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (with Bonham Carter delivering a glorious Cockney turn as Mrs Bucket), Big Fish and Corpse Bride. For the leading man Depp, the relationship with Burton goes back even further, to the touching 1990 fantasy movie Edward Scissorhands. As the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Depp was an instant choice for the director. Not so for Bonham Carter as Mrs Lovett.

“I had to fight for it,” she recalls. “More than for anything else I’ve done. I’ve been wanting to play the part since I was 13 – when I first saw the show. Tim said, ‘Well, you can try, but there’s no guarantee you’re going to get the part’.”

Casting that swept from London to New York, taking in leading actresses of the stage and pop stars like Cindy Lauper, eventually settled on Bonham Carter. It was Stephen Sondheim who had the final say. “Tim and I both burst into tears.”

As a young girl growing up in Golders Green, Helena would do her hair like Mrs Lovett and spend time locked in her bedroom going through the score and the lyrics. “I was a strange child,” she concedes.

In person there’s nothing strange about the actress who has become one of the finest ambassadors of British acting since her performance in the 1985 Merchant-Ivory film A Room With a View. Famed for her cut-glass vowels and smouldering delicacy, she finally swapped the corsets and fine muslins of films such as Howards End and The Wings of the Dove for roles like the cigarette-smoking bad chick Marla Singer in Fight Club and Woody Allen’s pushy wife Amanda in Mighty Aphrodite. More recently, she played a Jewish mother in Paul Weiland’s Sixty Six and a bridesmaid – “I wear one costume for the whole film, I’d love every film to be done on that scale!” – in Hans Canosa’s Conversations with Other Women.

These days, her aristocratic heritage – she’s the great-granddaughter of the prime minister Herbert Asquith – is frequently overlooked in favour of a focus on her eccentric, gothic, dress sense, fierce frankness and wild curls. She’s often labelled a witch, but in person she comes across as nothing other than beautiful and intense. “But you know I do like playing a witch,” she giggles.

And we’ve seen it; first as Bellatrix Lestrange in the Harry Potter movies – “I love that whole magical world, all the wizards and the witches” – and now in Sweeney Todd, prowling about the screen with a face caked in white slap, looking suitably rotten and hag-like. “It’s a bit of a horror movie, a Victorian melodrama, but in music. It’s operetta-like, actually.”

It’s also this year’s Moulin Rouge, but instead of Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor cooing over each other we have Bonham Carter and Depp eating people alive, or at least baking people alive for others to eat. The story dates to 1846 when a wrongly convicted barber returns from jail. Thirsty for revenge for his wife’s murder, he wields his razors to slit the throats of his customers, thus providing cheap filling for his landlady’s pies. It’s a story that film directors including Sam Mendes have been trying to get their hands on for years.

For the actors, it required three months of singing lessons, with Depp locking himself in a recording studio in LA to make a demo before he dared do it for real in London.

“Johnny’s singing voice is very sexy,” Bonham Carter reflects. He takes a role played in the past by actors and singers ranging from Ray Winstone to Bryn Terfel, and is a revelation in it – a worthy Golden Globe winner, in fact – delivering a Pirates-of-the-Caribbean-flavoured Cockney but with haunting sadness driving the role this time, rather than cocky playfulness.

“He really sings from the gut, and it’s a very emotional role,” reflects Bonham Carter, admiringly. “His singing is very naked and very touching.”

Depp is equally keen to gush about his on-screen wife. “She’s very brave,” he says. “Without question, that’s the toughest part in the movie and she beautifully made it her own. She’s made Mrs Lovett vulnerable, horrific, funny and sweet.”

Bonham Carter’s character is a lady who’s not really a lady but wants to be one, craving a man who is so intent on revenge that he never notices her. “I saw her as totally amoral, but full of zest and full of life,” says the actress. “She’s a survivor. But the main thing that motors her, the main thing that defines Mrs Lovett, is that she’s tragically in love with somebody who doesn’t love her back.”

The cast is rounded out by Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall (both of whom had singing training at Rada so had an easier time of it) and Sacha Baron Cohen, who came in and sang the entire score of Fiddler on the Roof at his audition to convince them to give him the part of the rival barber Pirelli.

“It’s been a very special experience for us all,” reflects Bonham Carter, before smiling wickedly at an apt choice of culinary metaphor: “For Tim this film has been marinating for 20 years.”

When casting ‘Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street’, Tim Burton made his partner Helena Bonham Carter audition. Nine times. So, has the healing begun?

ONCE everyone’s favourite English rose – thanks to her roles in the likes of A Room With A View (1985) and Howards End (1992) – the delightfully kooky and genuinely aristocratic Helena Bonham Carter finally managed to shake off her corset queen image in 1999 when she popped up as Brad Pitt’s bit of foul-mouthed rough in Fight Club.

From there on in, Carter started delivering the kind of sexually-charged performances – in movies such as Women Talking Dirty (1999), Novocaine (2001) and Conversations With Other Women (2005) – that would make your average Merchant-Ivory fan choke on their tea and scones.

Having met her current partner during the illfated 2001 remake of Planet Of The Apes, Carter and writer-director Tim Burton last month added a little sister to their family for their four-yearold son, Billy Ray, to play with.

That the couple, who got engaged in October 2001, are still together after the making of their latest movie (an adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street) is something of a relief for both parties, given that Carter has called the production “one of the toughest, most gruelling rites of passage we went through in our relationship”.

PAUL BYRNE: So, Helena, do you want to talk about it?

HELENA BONHAM CARTER: Yeah, it was tough, it was definitely tough. Auditioning, and not knowing if he wanted me, and he was tortured about whether I wasn’t right, but then Sondheim chose me, so that made it okay. But it was tough on both of us, making sure that I delivered, that he delivered.

You play Mrs Lovett, the pie shop owner who takes in Johnny Depp’s Sweeney Todd just as he goes on his roaring rampage of revenge against the judge who took away his wife and child and sent him to prison. It’s a role you had to do nine auditions for? You clealy didn’t want to get the Linda McCartney tag here…

Absolutely. It wasn’t an easy gig to get, but then again, I didn’t want to be cast for the wrong reasons. I knew Tim wouldn’t cast me for any obvious reasons – for any emotional reasons. He’d never do that. It was kind of a good thing to go through all those auditions, because, by the time I’d gotten the part, I knew that I really deserved it.

Tim has dreamt about adapting this musical for the big screen ever since he first saw it at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, back in 1980. Does that mean you’ve had years to prepare for this role?

No, no, no, I hadn’t, because he was going to do Ripley, and suddenly that collapsed, and he had time on his hands. I think it was me who told Tim he should try and make this, this dream project, but it all had to happen very quickly. Which meant we had very little time. It was all much shorter than usual, and I had three months of going to this poor teacher: “Can I sing in three months? Can you teach me?” The fact that it was this ridiculously hard part to sing didn’t really enter my head.

Sweeney Todd should turn out to be a very special movie for your latest addition, given that they probably know the songs just as well as you do…

Yeah, because I’m sure they’re going to recognise at least half of the songs here, and not know when or where they heard them.

It must make your job that little bit easier, given that you’re starring alongside your good friend, Johnny?

Yeah, he’s very conscientious and disciplined, and he’s probably a bit more obedient to Tim than I am. And he was very helpful, because I was pregnant halfway through, and therefore my focus wasn’t always the best. I had to give up caffeine, and that didn’t make it easy to jump to it. Johnny was very good at giving me signs offcamera when I was missing my cue.

Tim and Johnny are almost Fight Club close – is it like dealing with a second marriage for you?

They’re not like a married couple. They’re more like brothers, I’d say. They’ve got a lot of old jokes – poo jokes mainly, and American TV culture reference points. They’re pretty much on the same wavelength. And in this, Johnny’s hair was so much like Tim’s, they looked like twins at times.

Given the amount of razors on the set of this movie, was Tim ever tempted to go for a close shave, and the full back-and-sides?

Actually, sometimes he’ll come downstairs, and he’ll surprise you. It’s the comb, but he doesn’t really. Once I woke him up with a comb hanging over him, like a horror movie scene. He is clean though, I’ll give him that. He may look like he doesn’t care, but he does. He cleans his hair, conditions it and combs it, but then, within a day…

As a teenager, you were a big fan of musicals, and Sondheim’s in particular. At 13, you were so desperate to be Mrs Lovett you even had her hairdo…

Yeah, but the funny thing is, I didn’t quite realise I was doing it until one of my friends told me recently, “Well, we used to call you Mrs Lovett, don’t you remember?” I was a strange child…

Johnny looked at old movies like Mad Love and The Penalty to find Sweeney’s madness. How did you prepare to play a heartless wench like Mrs Lovett? Watch The Bride Of Frankenstein? The speeches of Margaret Thatcher?

Maybe I should have, but Tim wanted me to look at Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? – Bette Davis – and Bonnie & Clyde. Mainly those. And Mad Love, but I’d seen that already. We watch Mad Love at Christmas. Better than It’s A Wonderful Life.

Given that you’re sleeping with the director here, is it hard to keep your home life sane during the making of a movie this complex and intense?

We didn’t talk about the movie at home. That was banned. I listed rules to keep in place if we were going to work together. Rule number one was, don’t even go there at home; don’t talk about the job. Even if it’s a great idea, just keep it for the next day. And then it also became pretty obvious early on that I should watch my mouth on set too. Shut up, basically.

Are you able to judge one another’s work? Can you say to Tim, “Actually, honey, I think you went a bit too off the rails there”?

Eh, we don’t really watch our work, to be honest. I mean, I’m always gobsmacked when I see something that he’s made, because he’s very private, and doesn’t reveal much about what he’s doing. So, when you see the results, you’re going, “Oh, my God, you’ve been carrying that around in your head all this while”. So, it’s always a surprise, and I’m always amazed…