Helena Bonham Carter names the hardest role of her career: ‘Emotions came out during that movie’
She’s the queen of darkness, beloved by the people of the UK and beyond, and one of the finest actors of a generation. Helena Bonham Carter has always been candid about herself and her career. Known for her iconic roles in Harry Potter, Sweeney Todd, Fight Club and countless other titles spanning live-action, cartoon, weird and wonderful, Bonham Carter is nothing if not a national treasure, thanks in part to her outspokenness that has spanned her career and life.
More recently, Bonham Carter portrayed Princess Margaret in Netflix’s The Crown, but her heyday, if you can really pinpoint that, was between the 1990s to the early 2000s, with the likes of Fight Club, Corpse Bride and Conversations with Other Women hitting the big screen. Within that, 1998 was a rather tumultuous year for Bonham Carter, too, with plenty of personal life issues causing her stress.
Nevertheless, those films have endured and form some of the most iconic parts of Bonham Carter’s career. In more recent years, her villainous streak onscreen has been at the forefront of her persona, with Bellatrix Lestrange and the Queen of Hearts becoming synonymous with her. It’s often easy to forget the previous accolades that made her a household name.
When asked by Cinema what the toughest role of her career has been, Bonham Carter said: “Probably in Theory of Flight. It was a very hard road for me to go down because of my father’s illness. Emotions came out during the making of that movie, which I had effectively repressed for a long, long time.” In 1979, Bonham Carter’s father Raymond was diagnosed with a brain tumour, which was removed by surgery but left him quadriplegic and partially blind – he sadly died in January 2004.
The role Bonham Carter took on for the 1998 film was Jane, a young woman with a degenerative neurological disease who uses a wheelchair for mobility and a voice synthesizer to communicate. Bonham Carter continued: “When I researched the character and met a woman who had the disease, I saw that whatever complaints an actor may have or petty concerns, they’re nothing compared to what someone like that has to suffer. It puts things in perspective”.
Bonham Carter starred in The Theory of Flight alongside Kenneth Branagh, with whom she was in a controversial relationship at the time, surely making the experience all the more tense. Her more enduring and perhaps famous relationship was with influential director Tim Burton, whose films characterised Bonham Carter as a dark and moody actor. Burton and Bonham Carter met in 2001, changing the direction of her career and life.
Now separated from Burton, part of Bonham Carter’s allure is still her self-expression, be it through her fashion sense or her openness to the public. Voicing her struggles during the filming of The Theory of Flight goes to show that actors are not invincible and only adds to her status as a true national treasure and outspoken role model – no wonder she has a CBE.
