Word: bonham
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...first thought the contrast between Sheedy and Helena Bonham Carter, 19, the English star of Lady Jane and A Room with a View, is roughly that between Los Angeles and London. Then the imagined gap narrows. Each young woman is exceptionally intelligent, and each knows that she was chosen for her first role mostly for her looks, to please the camera as a pretty teenager. Each is the daughter of a prosperous and secure upper-middle-class family that was shaken by trauma. Sheedy's parents separated when she was nine, and she spent the rest of her childhood shuttling...
...flick, but an ambitious costume melodrama about the violent period after the deaths of Henry VIII (in 1547) and, six years later, his sickly young son Edward VI. Nevertheless--castles, moats, 16th century costumes and all--the film sinks at its worst moments to the level of teenage fantasy. Bonham Carter, small and dark haired, with huge brown eyes and a face that suggests a miniature in an antique locket, plays the doomed Lady Jane Grey, who lost her life at 16 in an attempt to prevent Henry's Catholic daughter Mary Tudor from succeeding to the throne of newly...
...Bonham Carter has no patience with the fuss made over her sweet beauty. "Prettiness has this connotation of passivity and innocuousness," she says. "Even 'actress' is irritating because it has overtones of glamour and stresses the female bit rather than acting. I don't want to be constricted and limited." But prettiness is only part of what the camera sees. Her formidable will is just as evident as those big eyes, and it is the contrast, the steel- butterfly effect, that is fascinating. She is, possibly, a shade too composed and cerebral in her thoroughly adult second film, the delightful...
...Bonham Carter is so exquisite a period piece that it is jarring to imagine her as a jukebox Juliet in some 1980s T shirt ripper. The reverse is just as emphatically true for most of the young American actresses. Try seeing Laura Dern's superior performance as a hormone-fogged California adolescent in Smooth Talk, for instance, and then envision her in a Victorian corset and long skirt. Fuses blow; imagination does not stretch that far. Dern, for starters, has too much Pacific Ocean salt in her blond hair, and her lanky good looks are too much a matter...
...film's evocation of the period sustains it in spite of the miscasting of Bonham Carter as Lucy, giving a performance all too reminiscent of an earlier role as the title character in Lady Jane. Perhaps the two characters are similar in personality, but it would seem more likely that Bonham Carter's nascent acting skills require broadening...