The actor Helena Bonham carter called her main inspiration: “An instant role model”
When we’re children, finding a role model might come in the form of a parent or perhaps one of the older kids at school, if not a celebrity that we find ourselves obsessing over.
It must be nicer, though, when you grow up surrounded by highly esteemed people, because your role model can soon be someone who can actually help you make it into your chosen industry.
For Helena Bonham Carter, who was born into a family of politicians, bankers, diplomats, and filmmakers (she even counts Florence Nightingale as a distant relative), it wasn’t hard for her to meet family friends whom she looked up to. That’s surely the greatest thing about being born into a wealthy, well-connected family – your opportunities are endless. It’s certainly not fair that some people are just born into this kind of luck, but nepotism plagues Hollywood, after all.
Anyway, Bonham Carter got her start in Hollywood in the 1980s, despite the fact that she had never acted before, but pretty soon she was cast as the lead in A Room With A View and Lady Jane. From here, she started to land more roles, typically in period dramas, and soon nothing was off limits. At the end of the ‘90s, she catapulted herself into Hollywood with Fight Club, which established her persona as a rather eccentric talent.
The decades that followed have been more than kind to Bonham Carter, who’s starred in everything from Harry Potter to Wallace and Gromit, with a good few Tim Burton collaborations thrown in for good measure. But would she have developed such a love for the arts if it hadn’t been for a family friend she admired – one who just so happened to be a classically trained actor?
It certainly helps to be surrounded by companies that are familiar with the industry, and for a young Bonham Carter, the presence of Lisa Harrow left her wanting to know more about being an actor. “Very, very early on, my main inspiration was an actress friend of my parents called Lisa Harrow,” she once revealed (via NY Mag). “My father fell in love with her – everybody had a crush on her, including my brothers. I just thought she was so glamorous and so beautiful, so I think she was an instant role model”.
Having trained at RADA, Harrow spent the ‘60s appearing in productions for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her roles in television and film weren’t as impressive, although she did find particular success when she played the titular role in the TV series Nancy Astor in the early 1980s.
Harrow clearly made an impression on Bonham Carter, because she started to show an interest in acting from a young age. Not everyone can say that an actor, especially trained in the art of Shakespeare, was a family friend, but Bonham Carter was lucky in that department.
Not only that, she was also inspired by a classmate, who further opened her eyes to the fact that acting can be a transformative experience. “And then I remember at school, one of my school friends, Carey Born, was on television. And I had a kind of envy, really. But the main instinct was that I didn’t really want to be me. I wanted to reinvent myself, I suppose,” she concluded.
