December 22, 1997

From the London Times, UK:

THE ENGLISH ROSE BLOOMS IN TIME FOR UNCLE OSCAR

by Matt Wolf

The packaging may be the same, but a new Helena Bonham Carter inhabits her role in The Wings of the Dove . Matt Wolf reports.

For years, it seems, Helena Bonham Carter was little more than a decorative pretty face who looked good in Edwardian garb; a natural beauty who shone on camera without revealing much of a soul. Indeed, in the eyes of many, her gifts had less to do with acting than with projecting a fresh-faced sheen. She would never aspire to the theatrical heights of, say, Dame Judi Dench. Still, it is the way of performers to surprise - after all, Emma Thompson had only fourth billing on the credits when she won her Best Actress Academy Award for Howards End - and there can be few surprises greater than Bonham Carter's emergence over the past few years as a genuine talent. Now the 31-year-old actress has emerged as this year's front-runner for the Oscar for her performance as Kate Croy in Iain Softley's new film of The Wings of the Dove in what looks to be a largely English race likely to include, you guessed it, Dame Judi herself.

"Helena will win the prize," a well-placed film executive said last week, and Bonham Carter is generating the early head of steam so necessary for keeping one's name in the minds of the nominators and the voters. She has already been named best actress by film critics' organisations in Los Angeles and Boston, as well as by the National Board of Review. (The influential New York Film Critics group gave their top prize to yet another Briton: Julie Christie, for the Alan Rudolph film Afterglow .) On Thursday, Bonham Carter was nominated for a Golden Globe, where she goes up against Dench (for Mrs Brown ) and Titanic 's leading lady Kate Winslet, as well as two Americans: Jodie Foster ( Contact ) and Jessica Lange ( A Thousand Acres ).

"I find it a bit freaky," Bonham Carter says. "It's wonderful to get a pat on the back, to have that exposure and demand." As regards the Oscars, where she has already been on the giving end of an award, she says: "I won't say the big O word, although of course I just have. I'm thinking, 'Hold your horses, babe; just try to keep your feet on the ground.' "

Like many performers who come belatedly into their own, a more mature Bonham Carter may simply be more suited to the medium. Last year she adjusted easily to the Shakespearean world of Trevor Nunn's otherwise ill-fated film of Twelfth Night , in which her Olivia caressed the verse as lightly as she did the face of Imogen Stubbs's Viola. Her ready charm as Richard E. Grant's put-upon girlfriend goes a long way towards enlivening a minor film such as Keep the Aspidistra Flying , while in Woody Allen's Mighty Aphrodite Bonham Carter proved that she can play New York neurotics in the best Diane-Mia tradition. None of these films, however, anticipated her power in The Wings of the Dove , in which she plays a clever young Machiavelli who isn't above using a dying American heiress called Millie (played by Alison Elliott) in order to snare the none-too-wealthy journalist Merton (Linus Roache).

Film adaptations of works by Henry James have proliferated of late - this is the third one in 14 months, following Wash ington Square and The Portrait of a Lady - but Bonham Carter's performance is one of the few to capture the writer's ambiguous morality, which is as stealthful and shadowy as the characters' nocturnal trysts.

Bonham Carter admits to doubting that she could do it justice. "It's a very haunting story," she says. "My biggest question mark was whether anyone would care two hoots about Kate. I suppose you don't have to like characters in a novel, but you really do on screen. Rule No 1 says you do have to care about somebody."

It didn't help, either, that Bonham Carter was somewhat thrown by the original 1902 novel, which director Softley and screenwriter Hossein Amini have pushed forward to the London and Venice of 1910. "They pay me to read these novels," she laughs, admitting that James would not be her first port of call at a bookstore. "He writes so densely, it's hard to tell what the hell he's talking about. It made me feel stupid because I just did not feel a sense of what he was going on about." The script, mean while, "was very sparely written, which was one of its strengths; it's the least wordy script I've ever done. That meant you had to bring a lot to it, and I had no idea if it was coming through." If the moral complexity posed a challenge, so, too, did the period: Bonham Carter was aware that she risked becoming a cliche in the bustle, corset and parasol-laden milieu of costume drama. She was only 18, after all, when she abandoned thoughts of Cambridge in order to play the title role in Trevor Nunn's Reformation-era love story, Lady Jane . The Forster trio followed: A Room With A View , Where Angels Fear to Tread and Howards End . Add her screen Ophelia (opposite Mel Gibson's Hamlet) and her partnership with Kenneth Branagh in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and there's no escaping the fact that Bonham Carter has played few contemporary roles: it's difficult to imagine her inhabiting, say, the film world of Mike Leigh, and she famously passed up the gruelling central role in Breaking the Waves that launched Emily Watson's career.

"My overwhelming reaction (to Wings ) was the Edwardian thing - that I'd have the same hair, the same frock. I thought, 'Don't do it, Hel; you've been there before.' "

Then, Bonham Carter decided, why not use age to her advantage? "Having got intrigued by the story, I thought that whoever plays Kate should not be under 25, or girlified. There is a maturity to her, a knowingness, and I was keen to play her with her hair down and not as an ingenue."

And historical parts are increasing ly becoming, well, history. Next year she will be seen in the film version of Alan Ayckbourn's The Revengers' Comedies , and early talk is of a second shot at the Oscar, based on reports from the set of her performance as a sufferer of motor neurone disease in The Theory of Flight . Perhaps it is time to conclude, endless carping in this country notwithstanding, that Helena Bonham Carter can actually act .

"I've learnt the long way round and probably had to bore everyone while doing it," she says. "I wasn't an instantly naturally super-talented actress. But now I do feel definitely more confident as an actor; a bit more legitimate, too. I'm not saying, hello, I can do it. But I might have just got it slightly right, I guess."