Helena Bonham Carter spent years trying to get away from her reputation as the queen of corsets, but she stepped back into period garb to play Queen Elizabeth, the wife of George VI and future Queen Mother, opposite Colin Firth in The King’s Speech. In person, she dresses more like Madonna circa Lucky Star, with a half-dozen silver chains slung around her neck and her nest of curls topped by a lopsided maroon bow. As she talked about her relationship with professional filmmaking oddball Tim Burton, her own arrested development and the Queen Mum’s acid wit, she negotiated a forest of drinking glasses filled with varicolored liquids on a nearby table (a penchant that earned her the nickname “Cups” from her “King’s” director Tom Hooper), pausing slightly to dispatch her mother to a nearby Duane Reade drugstore for vitamin supplements.
It’s tricky to play a figure as revered as the Queen Mother. You have to play her as an ordinary person but maintain an air of royalty, almost otherness. Playing her is a bit slippery because she’s so well loved and she’s so well known and she’s lasted for so long. She’s so ingrained in people’s heads. I don’t look like her, neither does Colin look like … [laughs] what’s-his-name. I went in search of her essence. It’s like finding the essence to a perfume. Something that’s recognizably her. She was a very complex character, but she would try and pass herself off as this charming, rather vague exterior — in a way, the archetypal woman. She played very low status. The head was always cocked, and she looked thoroughly sweet and cozy — which she wasn’t.
55 Steps
The Guns of August
