December 6, 2003

From the Mirror, UK:

HELENA ON HER MAGICAL NEW ROLE

by John Hiscock

SHE is the classic English rose who transformed herself into an altogether darker and more exotic bloom. And her love affair with cinema audiences cooled as she was dubbed a man-stealer and homebreaker.

But Helena Bonham Carter has survived all the setbacks to find happiness with quirky American director Tim Burton. And now she is burbling happily on about what it feels like to be a new mother.

"It's like an explosion of heart, love, everything - and it's extraordinary," gushes the petite, dark-haired English beauty, who gave birth to their son Billy two months ago.

"It's changed everything. Everybody told me it would, and, of course, I didn't really listen, and there's no real way of describing it." Helena, 37 and looking stunning, is talking for the first time about her man and the delights of motherhood.

"I am still in the early days, and I am very obviously breast-feeding," she says, indicating her ample cleavage. "So I live from feed to feed. It is all-consuming."

Tim, 45, whose films include Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood and Sleepy Hollow, was in the delivery room with her.

He later recalled: "It was like my own private Alien movie. I'll tell you, it was the weirdest thing I've ever seen. It was amazing."

They met when he directed Helena in Planet Of The Apes, and he has given up his life in America to set up home with her in London.

"You never know where your life is going to take you," she muses, "but we're very happy. When we were just director and actress making small talk on Planet Of The Apes, Tim asked me where I lived, and when I told him, he said that when he was in Hampstead doing Sleepy Hollow that was the place he really felt he belonged.

"Not Burbank, Cali-fornia, but Hampstead. Now we live just below Hampstead."

Helena's mother Elena, a psycho-therapist, lives nearby and is always on hand with help and baby advice.

"My brothers have six children, so she's a grandmother for the seventh time and it's lovely for her and for me," says Helena.

"It's opened up another realm in our relationship, because I perceive her in a different light now I've had a baby of my own."

Helena is clearly a happy woman but her love life was not always so joyful. Controversy erupted when she and actor-director Kenneth Branagh became lovers after they worked together on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in 1994.

Branagh was still married to actress Emma Thompson, but he left her in 1995 and they divorced in 1996.

He and Helena were together until 1999. Then, two and a half years ago, she became involved with Burton, ending his 10-year relationship with his fiancee, actress Lisa Marie.

Lisa Marie, who appeared in Burton's films The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow, Mars Attacks!, Ed Wood and Planet Of The Apes, was said to be distraught over the affair and her friends accused Helena of stealing her man.

Helena has always insisted that the affair began after Burton broke up with Marie and that they were not involved romantically during Planet Of The Apes. And although he is perceived as something of an eccentric, she says he is everything she wants in a companion and lover.

"It's just that sometimes he gets so excited that his mouth can't keep up with his brain and he's very physical, so he expresses a lot with his hands. He also paces up and down a lot," she says, smiling.

"On his last movie they gave him a pedometer because he was constantly pacing up and down - and he did 200 miles in three weeks.

"He is very warm, very tender, and, like me, he is utterly changed by becoming a parent. He's very romantic and gives me long-stemmed velvet roses."

Burton recently directed her again in Big Fish, a whimsical fantasy set in America's Deep South in which she stars with Ewan McGregor, Albert Finney and Jessica Lange. Helena jokes that he cast her in it because "I sleep with him". But it wasn't all roses and romance.

"He would walk straight past me and talk to Ewan as if I didn't exist," she recalls. "And at the end of the day he'd give Ewan lots of compliments and ignore me.

"He admitted later that he didn't want to be seen to have any favourites, but I said I really didn't think Ewan would mind and I had to tell him he had to compliment me, not just take me for granted.

"Then he took it too far and it was just too many compliments, so I said: 'Stop it. It's OK, it's OK."

Helena, great-granddaughter of British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, had her first leading role at 17 in Lady Jane and was typecast as a classic English-rose type because of her demure characters and roles in period dramas Howards End and A Room With A View.

But after restyling her hair and going nude in The Wings Of The Dove she dramatically reinvented her image.

As Marla, a sexily neurotic punk, she had steamy love scenes with Brad Pitt in Fight Club, stunning critics who had not expected that such a well-brought-up, delicate-looking woman could play a sexy tough girl so convincingly.

She spent Planet Of The Apes in a latex suit playing a female ape of whom co-star Mark Wahlberg later confessed: "I was very attracted to her - and I wasn't the only one."

As for a future in which she and Tim Burton grow old together, Helena laughs: "I've grown old. It's done. I'm already there."

More seriously, she adds: "Companionship, that's what we all seek. Long-lasting, for ever, till death."

Then she quotes from her mother, who is always ready with nuggets of advice: "But let's deal with the now, and see what happens later."