Helena’s upcoming film, The King’s Speech swept tonight’s British Independent Film Awards with Helena, Colin and Geoffrey all winning their acting awards! (Supporting Actor & Actress and Best Actor – as well as Helena’s already announced award, The Richard Harris Award). The film also won the Best Screenplay award, and the Best British Independent Film Award as well! Congrats to all the winners!

Liane and I will be updating the gallery, tomorrow, with plenty of pictures of Helena at the awards, with her mother, Elena. Unfortunately Tim wasn’t at the awards with Helena, as he has kidney stones!

Considering the intense security I had to wade my way through recently to visit Helena Bonham Carter at her Manhattan hotel, for a few moments it actually did feel like I might be visiting the Queen of England. (As it turned out, it was just the Israeli Prime Minister’s security detail.) Alas, no — just screen royalty, as proven in her latest effort, The King’s Speech.

The film features Carter as Queen Elizabeth, though to hear her tell it, she would have rather have played Elizabeth’s husband George VI — the King of England who, in the early years of World War II, trains with a speech therapist in order to lose a nasty stammer that’s plagued most of his life. Of course, that part went to Colin Firth, and Carter took a role she admits could, on paper, be considered thankless. A little more than a year later, she’s on her way to her second Oscar nomination. Movieline spoke to Carter about playing a historical figure who only died eight years ago, landing the role as Sonny Crockett’s girlfriend on Miami Vice and her infamous line that was cut from Fight Club.

Read the interview…

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.

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I have to say, I chucked to myself when I saw the title of this! :laughing: A rather…random interview with Helena about her role in The King’s Speech and Tim Burton. Enjoy!

Thanks to her many collaborations with her partner, Tim Burton, Helena Bonham Carter is now best known for eccentric, dark roles in such films as Sweeney Todd and Corpse Bride. However, as Emily Blunt noted after she starred in the royal drama The Young Victoria, “As an English actress, you have to don a bonnet at some point,” and this is Carter’s time to step into the House of Windsor: She currently stars in The King’s Speech as Queen Elizabeth, who encourages her husband, King George VI (Colin Firth), to overcome his devastating stutter when he has to make a public address announcing that England is declaring war on the advancing Nazis. We sat down with Carter, who was clad in anti-Queen chic (goth-goddess spiderweb tights, lace-up boots, black Anthropologie dress, and fingerless gloves) as she talked about balancing this queenly role with Harry Potter’s Bellatrix Lestrange, what Burton and Johnny Depp talk about that she just doesn’t get, and why Brits aren’t as fascinated by the royal family as Americans think they are.

You shot The King’s Speech simultaneously with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, didn’t you? On set for one of them one day, the other the next?

It was funny, my son would ask, “Do you have to play the witch or the queen tomorrow?” so that pretty much summed it up. It was interesting because Harry Potter is quite slow as a process, so I had a lot of down time. I was reading William Shawcross’s biography of the Queen Mother, dressed in my witch outfit! And you know what? It was a really good mix; it was a therapeutic mix.

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