From the Archives: The Romantic Englishwoman, Helena Bonham Carter
Spreading her wings: this month, Helena Bonham Carter takes on Henry James.
“The Romantic Englishwoman,” by Richard David Story, was originally published in the November 1997 issue of Vogue.
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Finally, after all those years of traipsing through one century after another—beginning with her debut twelve years ago as the sixteenth century's Lady Jane—Helena Bonham Carter has a role, albeit one set at the turn of the nineteenth century, in which she isn't just another detail in just another costume drama. "I've worn hair extensions for sooooo long that, I, too, had almost forgotten what I looked like." says Bonham Carter, who in a slip skirt, a teeny, tight cashmere top, and boyishly short hair is unrecognizable from the young woman she plays in The Wings of the Dove.
The hair, the corseted body, the satins and stays and buttons and hats—she had become a cliché, an overly tufted velvet pincushion of an actress. (The advantage, she says, was that these frocks-and-dull-suitors movies "pretty much guaranteed that I didn't have to take my clothes off.") Then along came Woody Allen class="xot-al" data-spotlight-artist="Allen" data-spotlight-artist-id="14754">Allen's Mighty Aphrodite, which won an Academy Award for Mira Sorvino and pushed Helena Bonham Carter into the twentieth century. But her bitchy up-to-the-second SoHo adulteress was just the beginning: In Dancing Queen (so far, released only in England), she was a stripper ("a tart with a heart"); in Margaret's Museum, she played—and I quote her—a "snot-nosed whore." This fall, Bonham Carter plays a frumpy, poetry-loving London spinster (in Keep the Aspidistra Flying): a victim of motor-neuron disease opposite newish boyfriend Kenneth Branagh (in The Theory of Flight), and Kate in The Wings of the Dove. In an astonishingly visual and engaging adaptation, director Iain Softley has turned Henry James's difficult and cerebral novel into an elegantly modern and psychologically sinister tale of love and betrayal with Bonham Carter as its centerpiece. Set amid the drawing rooms of London and the canals of Venice, The Wings of the Dove may win the 31-year-old actress her first Academy Award nomination.
"I personally don't think I deserve it," says Bonham Carter rather matter-of-factly, stubbing out a cigarette and plopping herself down on a couch the afternoon before Dove gets its big send-off at the Toronto International Film Festival. "It's not my best work, and as an actress, you intuitively know such things." Others would disagree, including Softley, who says no one else could have so exquisitely expressed Kate's "sense of Machiavellian connivance and gamine innocence." He goes so far as to say that it was "a tribute to how strongly we felt about having Helena that we were able to overlook the fact that she might be seen by some as a period-piece stereotype."
Odd that she came to that point, seeing how Lady Jane's director, Trevor Nunn, discovered Bonham Carter—she the great-granddaughter of British prime minister Lord Asquith—after seeing her face in an ad for stereo equipment nearly fifteen years ago. "Back then I had all the confidence that comes from immaturity and arrogance," she says. "I was quite academic, and I was resentful that I hadn't gone on to college." By the time Merchant and Ivory had cast her in A Room with a View, she was feeling quite isolated and even more insecure, which may explain why she still lives at home. And why does she? "Comfort, continuity, the sense of proportion that home gives me about my work." One journalist suggested, in a piece that Bonham Carter deeply loathes, that it may have to do with the fact that her father has been paralyzed and in a wheelchair for seventeen years (her mother is a French-Spanish psychotherapist).
Though she prefers not to talk about her life offscreen—and in particular her relationship with Branagh—she does say that she has recently bought a flat, not far from her parents. She still hasn't moved in. "Some would say I haven't yet developed my more feminine, domestic side," she jokes. "I want desperately to learn how to cook, pick out a couch—all those things that other people natter on and on about. But I can't even commit to a dinner date for a week from Tuesday."
For years, Bonham Carter has been stereotyped, particularly in America, as the quintessential English aristocrat. After the release of 1986's A Room with a View, she spent the whole of her Today-show interview dishing the horrors of the English class system. A publicist warned, beware—the American public just eats this sort of thing up with a spoon. Use it to your advantage. Bonham Carter finds the whole business rather amusing; even though her paternal great-grandfather may have been prime minister, he was also middle-class, from the north of England, and "they routinely give every prime minister the title of 'lord' as a sort of going-away gift after they leave office." (Her grandmother was Liberal personage Lady Violet Bonham Carter.)
Over the past seventeen years, Bonham Carter has made 20 films, played Marina Oswald on American TV, had guest roles in Miami Vice, and recorded an audiocassette of The Children's Garden. "It's been a good and very lucrative career," she says, adding, "and I like the lifestyle and the money." Still, the ill-fated Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (on whose set she met the then-married Branagh, the film's costar and director) is about as close as she's come to a big-budget Hollywood movie.
What she also hasn't done—up until The Wings of the Dove—is anything as graphic and sexual as her completely nude scene with Linus Roache at the film's conclusion. "I started laughing uncontrollably the first time out. Here I am completely naked and I have to look cool and sexy while sensually unzipping Linus's pants, while trying to pull them off him. All this in a room with six other people, and suddenly I thought, What the fuck am I doing!" Director Softley remembers the moment just slightly differently. "She turned to me at one point and said, 'Iain, please, just remember: One day I'm going to watch this movie with my granny.'”
