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Helen McCrory
Last night I saw that Helen McCrory had died, and that we were the same age. Both are still hard to believe. She was superb in everything I've seen her in; which meant mostly villainesses - most formidably perhaps as Evelyn Poole in Penny Dreadful - but not always; the last thing I've seen starring her was the National Theatre Production of Terence Rattigan's In the deep blue Sea, which was streamed last year. She was fantastic as a woman who left her unobjectionable yet boring husband not just for the young feckle lover whom she knows will not remain with her, but for the sense of being true to herself. The play starts with her unsuccesful suicide attempt, and yet he performance was such that it never invited pity. Sympathy, yes, fascination, too, but on her terms.
The first time I saw her in something it was probably in The Queen, playing Cherie Blair (a part she repeated in The Special Relationship); Peter Morgan gave her some of the best lines and made her the sardonic Greek Chorus commenting on the drama (and Tony's tendency to fall in platonic love with other powerful people). She had a voice ideally suited to the task. Then I saw her as Barbara Villiers, later Lady Castlemaine, in Charles II - The Power and the Passion; Barbara is amoral, smart and ruthless, and yet as she ages, there's something tragic about her, too. She's one of those antagonists who manage to make you regret them when they are defeated and leave. As importantly in this particular role, she also sold her as a woman of enormous sexual charisma allied to enormous willpower, which isn't the same as beauty. You believed that whoever Barbara wanted, she could have.
I hadn't recalled until last night, though I had read it somewhere years ago, that she'd been married to Damian Lewis, who was the one telling the world she had died, of cancer. There is always something deeply strange in feeling for people one never met, actors more than other artists, since their profession is to create other selves. And yet, it's not strange at all to grieve for a woman who was superb in this profession and who always, whether her part was small or large, captivated me in whichever fiction she starred in.
She should have had many more years of doing this. So many more.
The first time I saw her in something it was probably in The Queen, playing Cherie Blair (a part she repeated in The Special Relationship); Peter Morgan gave her some of the best lines and made her the sardonic Greek Chorus commenting on the drama (and Tony's tendency to fall in platonic love with other powerful people). She had a voice ideally suited to the task. Then I saw her as Barbara Villiers, later Lady Castlemaine, in Charles II - The Power and the Passion; Barbara is amoral, smart and ruthless, and yet as she ages, there's something tragic about her, too. She's one of those antagonists who manage to make you regret them when they are defeated and leave. As importantly in this particular role, she also sold her as a woman of enormous sexual charisma allied to enormous willpower, which isn't the same as beauty. You believed that whoever Barbara wanted, she could have.
I hadn't recalled until last night, though I had read it somewhere years ago, that she'd been married to Damian Lewis, who was the one telling the world she had died, of cancer. There is always something deeply strange in feeling for people one never met, actors more than other artists, since their profession is to create other selves. And yet, it's not strange at all to grieve for a woman who was superb in this profession and who always, whether her part was small or large, captivated me in whichever fiction she starred in.
She should have had many more years of doing this. So many more.
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I didn't know they had been married until I saw the news last night, either. I had seen her in half a dozen film roles and never marked her name and then that production of The Deep Blue Sea which I saw livestreamed in 2016 welded it to me permanently. I almost wrote about it then and instead, you know, the fall of 2016 happened. I would remember her for it if nothing ever else.
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