December 6, 2001

From the London Times:

ENGLISH ROSE RUNNING WILD

by Sean Macaulay Helena Bonham Carter found fame as a porcelain doll. But luckily the bad girl inside has won out, says Sean Macaulay

After starring in four E.M. Forster adaptations Helena Bonham Carter was as neatly pinned as a mounted butterfly. She is a strange exotic creature with a part continental lineage but for years the same few descriptions trailed her: English, pre-Raphaelite, porcelain, upper-crust, corseted. She was installed as the English rose of the Eighties by Dame Barbara Cartland, who hailed her as a vision of unruptured maidenhood after she starred in Cartland's romance A Hazard of Hearts.

Now the pendulum has swung the other way. Bonham Carter's concerted attempts to shake loose from her niche as the tasteful period drama beauty have paid off. At 35, she has a new pigeonhole from which to try to escape: the toxic punk princess. Her new film, Women Talking Dirty (see review page 11), sees her playing a lusty Scottish lass. Bonham Carter is the art house version of Sylvia Kristel, the former convent girl who ran away to become Emmanuelle, except it has taken over a decade for Bonham Carter to make the switch. Hollywood finally gave her the chance to show her range after she landed a Best Actress Oscar nomination for The Wings of the Dove in 1997. It was a fitting watershed to bridge her two dominant incarnations, as she was playing a femme fatale in an Edwardian drama. She began the film cinched at the waist as usual and ended it totally nude mulling the results of her evil scheme. Good Helena had retired. Bad Helena had arrived. Her reward was Fight Club, in which she got to unleash all her majestic toxicity in a flurry of chain-smoking nymphomania. Her fabled pale complexion was relocated to a phosphorous urban hell and immediately went from being consumptive to strung-out. She clearly revelled in the mischief of the part as she gave off nihilism and sexual abandon like steam. Being attended to by Brad Pitt and a pair of rubber gloves was, she said, "a liberation".

Her spiky-topped, junkie chic reappeared this year in Novocaine, suggesting she still enjoys the props of heavy eyeliner, trendy orthopaedic-style footwear and intense smoking, a habit she maintains off-screen.

She does have a kippered nicotine glow to her looks. It's actually an olive skin tint courtesy of her Jewish-French-Spanish-Russian-Viennese blood. "I'm a complete mongrel," she says. These were the looks that got her plucked from the pages of Tatler in 1986 by director Trevor Nunn to play the lead in Lady Jane. She had no formal training. She simply looked original. As a teenager heading for Cambridge her style had yet to come into focus. Now she is a sleeker creature with sallow cheeks and tamed eyebrows - a star who happily ramps up the glamour factor for her turns along the red carpet.

On her father's advice, she gave up college to find her feet as an actress. Within a year she was in A Room with a View and helping to usher in the era of Merchant-Ivory adaptations - courtly romances, sunny climes, characters with nothing to do but saunter through meadows twirling parasols. Such was her impact as the lovestruck Lucy Honeychurch that Bonham Carter still has to endure the wit of hotel staff everywhere who insist on giving her a vista.

Within four years, she was able to play a decent enough Ophelia opposite Mel Gibson's hyperactive Hamlet, but she was still not comfortable with playing grandly. She remained an exquisite miniaturist: quizzical, sensitive, a shade too polite. But she had mastered the knack of playing against the prevailing cast. In Twelfth Night, for example, while all the luvvies assembled by Trevor Nunn mugged and capered and generally wore out their welcome trying to be twinkly, Bonham Carter stayed true to the emotion of the frustrated ardour behind the identity swapping.

In Branagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, she amazingly managed to invest pathos into the spectacle of Dr Frankenstein reviving his deceased fiancee despite her stitched-up skin looking more like the title character in Bride of Chucky.

Her five-year romance with Branagh led to a gruesomely twee collaboration in The Theory of Flight. It was a noble addition to that dreaded genre: the love story about two people you don't actually want to see making love. Bonham Carter played a victim of motor neuron disease with attitude: she drives her wheelchair wearing leather racing gear. Branagh played the beautiful weirdo who tries to fly by jumping off rooftops. The story is her attempt to get him to deflower her.

Bonham Carter felt a kinship to the story because her father has suffered from the disease since she was a teenager. "I've never been quite so emotionally and intellectually committed to something." But it was not to be another My Left Foot.

Bonham Carter has her own beautiful weirdo in real life, now that she is dating director Tim Burton. The actress was much the best thing in Burton's fatuous remake of Planet of the Apes. Her performance under latex was so credible the film cried out for a love scene between her humanist ape and Mark Wahlberg's astronaut. Such a coupling would only be marginally more bizarre than Bonham Carter and Burton. Visually, the pair are all of a piece - the Goth Brad and Jennifer, a tangle of witchy black hair surrounding a suntan-free zone. The liaison is already shifting Bonham Carter into a new gear of stardom. Hollywood stardom. The results will be interestingly strange (Burton couldn't get any stranger) - like moving a hothouse flower into the light.