Word: bonham
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...actress has no such limitations on her roles, but Bonham Carter was always one for intrigue. In secondary school she announced that she wanted to be a spy--because she loved Charlie's Angels. "It was about being someone else," she says. "Acting is a natural extension of that: being liberated by putting on a mask...
...Being a Bonham Carter might seem enough, for her family story is one of distinction and poignant drama. Her great-grandfather H.H. Asquith was Prime Minister in the very years (1908-16) when so many of her films are set. Her father, a Harvard business school graduate, was a successful banker until, after an operation for a benign brain tumor, he suffered a paralyzing stroke. Helena has her looks from her mother, a psychotherapist of Franco-Spanish-Austro-Russian-Jewish ancestry. She lived with her parents until she was 30, when she bought an apartment a few minutes from their...
Accepted at Cambridge University, Bonham Carter decided to pursue acting full time. She had made Lady Jane when she was 18 with, she says, "the confidence that comes from complete ignorance." By her next film, A Room with a View, she had learned how much she didn't know. "I was always asking, 'What am I doing here?' But then I'm my own worst judge--I'm indulgently self-critical. I came out of the first screening of The Wings of the Dove depressed and inconsolable. My mother had to remind me that that's my response to everything...
...Bonham Carter's career has not lingered exclusively in Edwardiana; curiosity drives her into many movie landscapes. She is splendid as the impatient girlfriend of penniless poet Richard E. Grant in a lovely new film of George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying. She has played Marina Oswald (the TV movie Fatal Deception), Woody Allen's selfish wife (in Mighty Aphrodite), Sister Clare to Mickey Rourke's Francis of Assisi (no, really, in the 1989 Francesco), a French-speaking fashion designer (Portraits Chinois), a bachelor-party stripper (the BBC's Dancing Queen) and a scrubwoman who lops off vital parts...
...this last film, she declined Lars von Trier's offer of the lead role in Breaking the Waves, which earned Emily Watson an Oscar nomination as the simple Scottish girl who wills her paraplegic husband back to health. "Having lived with a father who was crippled for 17 years," Bonham Carter says, "I didn't buy the miracle at the end. It was a tough decision." She doesn't regret it. "I couldn't have done it. Emily Watson is much better than I would have been...