Word: bonham
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...expect no less of Bonham Carter, who has been a source of posh insolence since her 1985 screen debut as the teen-age Queen of England in Lady Jane. She is our modern antique goddess--a balky Ophelia, for instance, to Mel Gibson's Hamlet. But it is in the early 20th century that her sweet imperiousness has been put to smartest use; she has made no fewer than four films based on E.M. Forster novels (A Room with a View, Maurice, Where Angels Fear to Tread and Howards End). She finds the age attractive--"Women tend...
...demanding role," says Iain Softley, the film's director, "because Kate does dark things and yet she has to be sympathetic." At 31, Bonham Carter is up to the challenge, physically and technically. She is, for a start, fully ravishing now. Her dramatic coloring--black eyes, ivory skin--is splashed on a tauter canvas. Maturity has made her chipmunk cheeks swankly concave, allowing her, as Kate, to mull her plotting as if it were a fine port. Bonham Carter has always had the intense stare of a schoolgirl over her maths, but now her face is filled with midnight radiance...
...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...