October 27, 2001

CALL IT CHEMISTRY TIM BURTON AND HELENA BONHAM CARTER

The director and actress have been spotted walking hand-in-hand, fuelling rumours of a relationship that started on the set of Planet of the Apes

There was something about the pictures of Helena Bonham Carter and Tim Burton on a walk together that really thrilled me. You could see it wasn’t just hands they were holding. It was some ancient love map they’ve each had since childhood that had suddenly led them to each other. Why? Because they look like they’re the same person. Hideous interchangeable chunky coat in black, old, careworn clothes, way beyond shabby chic, padded face, dark eyes and dark hair sticking up in places. They entirely matched each other.

A friend of mine says the way to tell if a relationship will last is by looking at a photograph to see if you look like your partner. I used to think that couples who were together for a long time just developed the same facial expressions which set their features in the same sort of way. But, sure enough, you can tell when something’s right. Paul Daniels the magician looks like his wife; now there’s a happy couple.

Tim Burton and his mermaid-shaped former girlfriend and eternal fiancée, Lisa Marie, did not look like each other. She looked like a kitsch ornament that he adored only in a surrealistic way. Helena Bonham Carter and Kenneth Branagh looked ridiculous together. She was heartbroken when he dumped her, but somehow she became the living example that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. When she was with him, she was an irritating, uptight, eternal-virgin-in-a-sexual-straitjacket actress. She was 30-odd and still living at home, for God’s sake.

Before Wings of the Dove, she only had to appear on screen and I’d get the creeps. But the post-Branagh period has seen her more quirky, more aware, and sumptuously talented, or at least in touch with her own talent, and never more so than as the sexy chimp in Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes. I don’t know how it’s possible for a chimp to be sexy without being disgusting or sending its viewers to jail, but somehow she achieved that. It must have been because she was feeling it on the inside.

Burton has always loved that pale, fragile goth look. He cast Winona Ryder in Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands and Christina Ricci in Sleepy Hollow because he’s always been attracted to dark frailty coupled with inner steeliness. When he offered Helena the part, he said, "Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re the first person I thought of to play the chimp." It later emerged that he got his first-ever kiss from a girl at school dressed as a monkey. There has to be a connection.

He had been living with Lisa Marie since 1992. She’s a model and an actress, although I’ve never seen her act in a movie that wasn’t directed by him. Helena had been single in a rather hormonal Bridget Jones way for a couple of years. They seem to have found each other at the right time. She’s 35. He’s 42. Even though Lisa Marie was also in the movie, somehow Burton and Bonham Carter smouldered along. Who knows exactly when it ignited, but Lisa Marie separated from him officially after filming ended with cries of "mutual parting".

Perhaps Tim and Helena were fuelled by the eroticism of the shared endeavour. Every day she had to get up at 3am and spend four hours having her fur face slapped on; very gruelling. He sent her to ape school so she could learn how to walk as if she was wearing a big nappy and make it seductive and graceful. Perhaps if she hadn’t had the experience of those Merchant Ivory corsets-and-crinoline dramas, she would have found this restricting. Instead, the flirtatious chimp was "a real liberation. A mask is a licence to misbehave."

The story of Planet of the Apes is about having respect for all forms of life. She tries to help the human character, played by Mark Wahlberg, who is captured and forced into slavery. "It’s fitting that Ari helps the planet’s ill-treated humans," she says of her character. "She is idealistic, from a dying liberal dynasty, and that’s why I thought, ‘That’s the role for me’. I am from a dying liberal dynasty. My great-grandfather, Lord Asquith, was the last Liberal prime minister of Britain."

For as long as she was strapped into her corsets, she played down her upper-class heritage. Now that she no longer lives at home, she is curiously more forthcoming. Her mother, Elena, is a psychotherapist and her father is the Honourable Raymond Bonham Carter. She was only 13 when he became paralysed from the waist down after an operation for a brain tumour went wrong. She helped her mother take care of him; perhaps that explains why Helena found it so hard to leave.

Burton’s family were the kind of suburban straight types - where less is definitely less - that he never came to terms with. His father died just before filming of Planet of the Apes began. His films are all about repressed, nerdy, dog-loving liberals. It’s as if he’s always recreating a kind of soulless suburb of his childhood. He said recently that he’d made a lot of progress in relation to his parents, but was not necessarily able to tell his father about his change of heart. "I didn’t communicate with him much in life. I’m not going to start now."

He and Lisa Marie had a chihuahua called Poppy, whom he adored, and on the day the movie opened in America, her kidneys gave out and she died. He was distraught. It also seems that Poppy’s death severed the final link with Lisa Marie; their fur child had passed on and their relationship too was having organ failure. Perhaps Lisa Marie, for all her flights into bad taste, was only putting it on for a joke, whereas there really is something interestingly perverse about Burton that bonds with the equally strange Helena. You know that she’s going to become his muse and there’ll be vampiric heroines in future epics, but probably there’ll be something more than just the professional inspirational quality to their relationship. It looks like they’ve found themselves in each other.