May 10, 1996

From the London Times, UK:

HOW HELENA GREW UP IN A VIOLET SHADOW

by Valerie Grove

Helena Bohnam Carter is one our our leading actresses - but she still chooses to live at home because she is too lazy to move out. In her family's drawing room in Golders Green, Helena Bonham Carter stands by the Orpen portrait of her grandmother, the redoubtable Lady Violet. The resemblance is strikingly non-existent: Violet's fine, elongated, patrician head; Helena's heart-shaped face and dark gamine look, compounded by the tennis shoes beneath the frock she changed into out of T-shirt and jeans for the picture.

On Monday she starts filming Henry James's The Wings of a Dove. (``Yes, another Edwardian heroine, how predictable.'') Tomorrow afternoon you can hear her in Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle on Radio 4, as Rose: ``A complete bitch, quite heartless. Great fun to play.''

But today she is playing herself Helena BC (as she signs herself), granddaughter of Asquith's daughter Violet, whose fascinating letters and diaries, Vol.I: Lantern Slides, are published by Weidenfeld on Monday. They reveal that at the age of 17 Miss Asquith was better informed and more opinionated than most people thrice her age.

As I arrived chez the Bonham Carters (Lady Violet called it Hampstead, but leafy Golders Green it is: a London country house with its own tennis court) a lift descended and out wheeled Raymond Bonham Carter, Helena's father, a former merchant banker whose paralysis 17 years ago made Helena, at 13, decide that she would have to look after herself.

The family was on holiday in Greece when Raymond became conclusively deaf in one ear. A routine operation for acoustic neuroma was bungled, leaving him partially blind and wheelchair-bound. ``He wasn't meant to live, but chose to. He is a stubborn man, with a certain amount of cussedness and not an iota of self-pity,'' Helena says.

Father and daughter sit at a large table covered with letters, in a room papered in brilliant African scenes, with french doors to a sunny garden. Helena is all filial sweetness. You see why she, the baby of the family, still lives at home even though she will be 30 this month and could easily afford a place of her own. (``I'm just too lazy to move out.'') Her rocking horse is still under the stairs, and the tiny chair that was bequeathed to her by Violet.

``My mother could seem intimidating: she was opinionated, and loved argument,'' says Raymond. ``She wrote to me every week when I was at school, as if to an adult like her father's letters to her. She was Asquith's boon companion after her mother died and he slept in her bedroom. Every night she would cross-examine him about his day in the Commons. When she was five, he took her to tea with Mr Gladstone, and she told her nanny that Mr Gladstone wolfed his food.''

``I don't honestly remember her,'' says Helena, who was rising three when Violet died in 1969. In a picture of herself on her grandmother's knee, she is fair: it turns out that despite her dark eyes from her French-Spanish mother Elena, Helena is secretly a blonde. ``I do recall a dim, long corridor at her house at Hyde Park Gate, and a smell of cooking. I wrote down my memories of her when I was 13.'' ``Helena is a great diarist herself,'' Raymond says. Has he read them? Helena: ``No way.'' ``Well,'' says her father, `` I remember her descriptions, at eight, of a visit to Kenya.''

``Lots of people taxi drivers tell me about my grandmother as an old lady,'' says Helena. ``It's a luxury to get to know how she was at my age. I find her confidence terrifying. It wasn't just that she was the privileged daughter of the Prime Minister; she lived so vividly, and she had such a reverence for words. Today, the word is superseded by images. And our concentration is not improved by television. I feel inspired by her turn of phrase.''

Violet at 17 was dining and arguing with archbishops, earls, ambassadors. Her observation of people (``Mrs Sidney Webb wife of goat-bearded bore'') was acute. In Paris she attended philosophical lectures by Bergson, and discussed his theories. Tutored at home and mixing only with clever adults (``We are all worms,'' Winston Churchill told her at dinner one night, ``but I do believe I am a glow-worm''), she gained wisdom by osmosis.

At that age, Helena was at Westminster School, getting her three grade As at A level, and a place at Cambridge to read modern languages if she had not been diverted into films. Most of her friends went to Oxbridge ``so I felt very isolated''. She would have been a Zuleika Dobson, sending young men tumbling out of punts. ``I could have gone, after Room With A View, but my father said carry on, it's a unique experience.''

So Helena, with no acting training, had to overcome the twin drawbacks of being both a striking beauty and the scion of a great family. She had to learn on the hoof, on camera: ``Very exposing.''

It was in Howards End when she played Helen Schlegel, Violet's contemporary, that she began to be curious about her grandmother's indifference to the suffragettes, ``since she was so exercised by inequality in every other walk of life. Perhaps it was because she never experienced discrimination herself.'' Or because she saw her father showered with pepper by the militants.

Violet's accounts are of weekend parties at great houses ``with all the ancient discomforts'', debutante balls ``being swirled giddily around by a new young man every five minutes'' where everyone has a nickname (Bongie, Baffy, Bim, Gugs, Lousebags, Tweeders, Swank) and where swains are defined as eligibles, detrimentals and drumbores; of exotic travels, and a proposal of marriage, when her brother advised: ``Married to Hugh, you could not reach your highest;'' of her engagement on his deathbed to Archie Gordon (``melodramatic,'' says Helena). Family history records that Violet was paralysed by some psychosomatic disorder in early teens. ``Attention-seeking,'' says Helena.

Helena's precocious stardom (via a Tatler photograph, shown to Trevor Nunn, who cast her as Lady Jane Grey immediately after her A levels) was sustained by ``the confidence of ignorance.

``The flipside is, I was very conscious of criticism, and realised how much I had to learn.''

When critics say she gets better and better, thanks to breeding and intelligence, it reminds her gloomily of how bad she was at first; she tries to have a sense of humour about it. ``I feel I can disown my earlier self. I'm always surprised at how podgy and high-voiced I was.''

The podge is gone, the voice low. And the ``bane of looking too young to play anyone emotionally mature'' is lessening. She is Olivia in Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night, and currently Woody Allen's art gallery-owning wife in Mighty Aphrodite. That offer came while she was playing a coalminer's daughter in Nova Scotia. ``I flew like the wind to New York and gave a very lacklustre reading.'' While filming in bed with Woody, whom she reveres, she discovered that he kept on his clothes and even his shoes ``in case there's a fire,'' he said when she asked. ``He's a stack of phobias, and an escapologist.''

Helena remains enigmatic herself; consciously dressing down. I admire her new straw hat: ``Twenty quid at Accessorize,'' she says. She mentions the biological clock, but has decided never to discuss her private relationships with Ken Branagh, or with anyone. ``They are hard enough anyway, but even harder if you conduct them in public.''

Her fierce intelligence struck me as I watched the recording of tomorrow's I Capture the Castle. Her petulant opening line (``I see nothing romantic about being shut up in a crumbling ruin surrounded by a sea of mud'') is very Helena. She next goes to Venice for Wings of a Dove: ``I'm playing another cruel, mercenary type. And it's corsets and parasols again.'' Had her grandmother been an actress (as she once wanted) she might have said the same.