Helena Bonham Carter

Helena Bonham Carter (born May 26, 1966, London, England) is a British actress whose dark aesthetic brought flair to roles ranging from period pieces to modern fantasy.

Bonham Carter grew up in London. Her mother, Elena, was a psychotherapist, and her father, Raymond—grandson of H.H. Asquith, who served as prime minister from 1908 to 1916—was a merchant banker who became partially paralyzed after an operation to remove a brain tumour. At age 13 Helena decided to pursue an acting career, and by 16 she had landed a role in a television commercial, playing William Shakespeare’s Juliet in an advertisement for a stereo system. The part proved to be an indication of Bonham Carter’s future career, which was built on a foundation of period pieces and adaptations of works by such classic authors as E.M. Forster, Shakespeare, and Henry James.

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In 1983 Bonham Carter appeared in her first major role, in the made-for-television movie A Pattern of Roses. Though she intended to pursue a university education, she abandoned that aspiration at the coaxing of director Trevor Nunn and accepted the title role of his film Lady Jane (1986). Around the same time, she was cast in A Room with a View (1985) as Edwardian heroine Lucy Honeychurch, a young socialite who is conflicted by her feelings for two men. The film was widely praised by critics and was nominated for eight Academy Awards. Bonham Carter continued to appear in period roles, playing Ophelia in Hamlet (1990), Helen Schlegel in Howards End (1992), and Elizabeth in Frankenstein (1994). In 1995 she began to break away from “English rose” roles with her portrayals of Margaret, a young woman suffering the hardships of life in a Canadian coal-mining town in Margaret’s Museum, and of a high-strung wife in Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite. Her first Academy Award nomination came for her performance as Kate Croy in The Wings of the Dove (1997).

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Bonham Carter subsequently began to make a name for herself in more contemporary roles, such as that of Marla Singer, an eccentric support-group addict in David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999); the film starred Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. Bonham Carter met director Tim Burton while working on his remake of Planet of the Apes (2001), and the two became longtime romantic partners. Bonham Carter subsequently worked with Burton on a number of films—including the animated Corpse Bride (2005), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), Alice in Wonderland (2010), and Dark Shadows (2012)—all of which featured another of Burton’s favoured actors, Johnny Depp.

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In 2011 Bonham Carter was nominated for a second Academy Award, for her role as Queen Elizabeth alongside Colin Firth’s King George VI in The King’s Speech (2010). She subsequently appeared on-screen as Miss Havisham in a 2012 adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, as the vicious Mme Thénardier in a 2012 film version of the musical Les Misérables, and as an Old West brothel owner in The Lone Ranger (2013). Also in the early 21st century, she received critical acclaim for her portrayal of mad witch Bellatrix Lestrange in the Harry Potter movie franchise. Bonham Carter evinced more-beneficent qualities as the fairy godmother of the title character in Cinderella (2015). She played a firebrand woman-suffrage campaigner, based on real-life activist Edith Garrud, in Suffragette (2015). In 2016 she reprised her role as the strangely proportioned Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland in Alice Through the Looking Glass. Bonham Carter then appeared in Ocean’s 8 (2018), a female-driven reboot of the Ocean’s Eleven franchise from the early 2000s. In 2020 she was cast as the title character’s mother in Enola Holmes, an action adventure based on a young-adult series about the teenaged sister of Sherlock Holmes; she reprised the role for the 2022 sequel.

In addition to her film roles, Bonham Carter appeared in several stage plays in her native England, including The Tempest (1987), Trelawny of the “Wells” (1992), and The Barber of Seville (1992). She also made several appearances in BBC radio plays and TV movies, including Burton & Taylor (2013), in which she portrayed Elizabeth Taylor, and David Hare’s spy thrillers Turks & Caicos (2014) and Salting the Battlefield (2014), in which she evinced a former MI5 analyst. In 2019 Bonham Carter lent her voice to the TV series The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, a 10-episode prequel to the 1982 puppet fantasy The Dark Crystal. She then appeared as Princess Margaret in seasons three and four (2019–20) of the series The Crown.

Bonham Carter was known for her unconventional fashion sense, which landed her on both best- and worst-dressed lists over the years. She was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2012.

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