October 1, 2003

From "the Scotsman":

I'M NO TUDOR ROSE

by Karen Hockney


Helena Bonham Carter is lying on a sofa in her trailer at Pinewood Studios with a cushion propped under her back, softly caressing her stomach. "Sorry I’m so laid back but it’s the only way I can feel comfortable," she explains.

She is due to give birth in a matter of weeks and looks radiant, if a little uncomfortable, in an unforgiving corseted, ruby-red gown decorated with dazzling jewels. The regal costume is for her role as Anne Boleyn in ITV1’s lavish two-part drama Henry VIII and it is one that she seems tailor-made for, with her flawless porcelain skin and cut-glass accent.

Her predilection for period roles has earned the 37-year-old actress a reputation as an aloof, somewhat eccentric English rose with a penchant for thrift-shop clothes, but in the flesh she is earthy, witty and warm, with an endearing fondness for sending herself up.

Describing the bond she shares with her equally eccentric American film-director boyfriend Tim Burton, she says: "Everyone says we look right together. I think it’s because we don’t believe in combs and we complement each other on the smart front." She breaks into a saucy, infectious giggle.

It is hard to believe that less than two years ago she was going through a mid-life crisis. Her five-year relationship with Kenneth Branagh, whom many friends expected her to marry, ended when he unceremoniously dumped her.

"I had a crisis when I was 35," she says. "I thought, ‘I’m still single and I’m never going to meet someone’. I was stumped because I couldn’t think of who I’d meet or what kind of person I would be with.

"I really did think all this might have passed me by," she says, gesturing to her bump, "because you reach a certain age where you wonder if it’s going to happen or not. But if it hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have known what I was missing, I guess."

With her life at a crucial junction, she opted first to change the course of her career. Having spent years closeted away in Merchant-Ivory crinolines with roles in A Room With A View, Howard’s End and other classics such as Twelfth Night, Hamlet and Lady Jane, she embarked on more daring roles.

She says: "I didn’t make a conscious decision to stay away from period stuff, I just choose the parts that interest me. It’s others who pigeonhole you as this or that."

But her choices suddenly became a lot more unpredictable as she plumped to play a neurotic self-help addict in Fight Club and a foul-mouthed single mother in Women Talking Dirty.

Although the controversial choices deftly reinvented her career, it was her personal life that troubled Bonham Carter the most. With old flame Branagh finding love again (he recently married Lindsay Brunnock, a film art director), she was left with the unnerving feeling that she would never find "the one".

She and Burton met in 2001 when she starred in his remake of Planet Of The Apes, but it was not love at first sight. They were friends for months before Bonham Carter - who has previously been linked with Rufus Sewell and comedian Steve Martin - and Burton, who was engaged to the pneumatic starlet Lisa Marie for nine years, finally got together.

With his chaotic dress sense, unruly hair and fondness for Hollywood’s dark side, explored through his films Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow and Beetlejuice, 41-year-old Burton makes an obvious match for Bonham Carter.

"We’ve been together almost two years," she says. "We became friends while filming Planet Of The Apes but we certainly didn’t get involved. We didn’t even have a proper conversation because he’s quite shy. Nothing happened until way after we’d finished working on it.

"Falling in love with him was completely unexpected. When you only see someone as a friend, you don’t expect anything else. There was definitely a moment when something quite magical happened and we both agree that it transformed our relationship.

"Everyone else around us could see that we were going to be suited because we are quite similar and when we finally started going out, people were like, ‘Doh, how come it took so long for you to see it?’ But I suppose for a long time I didn’t look at him in that way."

Much has been made of the fact that Burton bought the house next door to Bonham Carter’s in Belsize Park, north London, whereupon they knocked a hole through the wall rather than simply buy a bigger house together.

She says: "These stories about us living in houses next door to each other because we want our own space are ridiculous. He couldn’t move in with me because he would never fit in my house. It’s a house for one person. We are going to join them together properly and build another room."

With domestic bliss achieved, Bonham Carter is returning to British television screens for the first time in nine years in Henry VIII as the fiery Anne Boleyn, joining a star-studded cast including Ray Winstone as Henry, Charles Dance, Emilia Fox, David Suchet and Sean Bean.

"It’s fun to be back in a costume again. I’ve not been trussed up in a corset for ages. I had to say yes to it because I love the Tudors, they’ve got amazing glamour and intrigue. I was always fascinated by Henry VIII as a kid, and all those wives and the romance of it. He was one of the first monarchs who married for love and the way he got rid of his wives was so ridiculously outrageous. I mean, beheading them - it’s terribly dramatic isn’t it?

"Part of me thinks, ‘Oh God, am I so predictable to go back and be doing this again?’ but you have to be driven by what you want to do. That’s ultimately the reason for doing something or not. It was also about the fact that it appealed to the little girl in one, being able to dress up and make a lovely queen."

The character of Boleyn also appealed: "Anne was feckless and political, and that was her mistake, getting involved with politics and the factions in court. She was too outspoken and bold and that was her downfall. She has all the characteristics that we admire today, even if then they were thought ill of. But that is often the definition of a heroine - someone who isn’t of their time."

The great-granddaughter of former prime minister Lord Herbert Asquith, Bonham Carter grew up with her banker father and Spanish psychotherapist mother in Golders Green, north London. As a teenager she won a writing competition and used her winnings to pay for an advertisement in a British casting guide.

She made her screen debut in 1985 playing Lady Jane Grey in Trevor Nunn’s film about the doomed Tudor queen. Her performance caught the eye of James Ivory, who cast her in A Room With A View, and before long her burgeoning acting career forced her to drop out of Cambridge University.

With an enforced break ahead of her to enjoy motherhood, she is clearly deliriously happy with her lot.

Marriage is not on the agenda yet, although she says: "I would not rule out the possibility of us getting married, but one thing at a time.

"A lot of girls feel that they need to have that assurance, have that piece of paper, but I don’t feel that. I’m just looking forward to enjoying my baby."

Henry VIII will be screened on ITV1 next month.