While she may seemingly be typecast in period films, Helena Bonham Carter has proven her range and ability in a variety of roles in her relatively short career. As a teenager, the pale-skinned, dark-haired beauty won a writing contest and used the proceeds to buy an advertisement in a British casting guide. The great-granddaughter of British Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith, Bonham Carter has often been cast in solemn aristocratic roles. To some, she has become the quintessential Edwardian heroine, particularly after her successful turns in several adaptations of E M Forster novels.
Her dark looks and heart-shaped face made Bonham Carter a perfect choice for her first film lead in Trevor Nunn's film version of the life of the doomed Tudor monarch "Lady Jane" (1986). Despite her relative youth, she was also able to project the requisite mix of hauteur and innocence required for the role. Her second film, the Merchant-Ivory production of Forster's "A Room With a View" (1986), firmly established her as a screen presence. As Lucy Honeychurch, Bonham Carter perfectly essayed a young woman swept up in passion. She further solidified her stereotyping as a "period player" with her dead-on mad Ophelia to Mel Gibson's "Hamlet" (1990), by playing the impulsive younger sister of Emma Thompson in Merchant-Ivory's meticulous rendering of "Howards End" (1992) and her turn as the delicate love interest of scientist Kenneth Branagh in "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" (1994).
Breaking free from her usual fare, Bonham Carter delivered a fine portrayal of a drug addict engaged to Don Johnson's detective on NBC's "Miami Vice" in 1987. She won applause as a working-class stripper in the British TV-movie "Dancing Queen" and was superb as Marina Oswald in the NBC telefilm "Fatal Deception: Mrs. Lee Harvey Oswald" (both 1993). As Woody Allen's unhappy spouse contemplating an affair in "Might Aphrodite" (1995), Bonham Carter seemed to be eerily channeling Mia Farrow, especially in her vocal cadences. The role of the foul-mouthed, married coal miner's daughter in the Canadian-made "Margaret's Museum" (also 1995) earned her fine notices (and a Genie Award) but the film was little seen.
Returning to the bread-and-butter roles in period garb, Trevor Nunn tapped her for Olivia in his filming of "Twelfth Night" (1996). For personal reasons, Bonham Carter turned down the role of Bess in Lars von Trier's "Breaking the Waves" (1996) and watched Emily Watson receive critical bouquets and accolades. In 1997, it was her turn in what many felt was the best role of her career to date. As the manipulative Kate Croy, a role that in another era may have been played by Bette Davis, in Iain Softley's "The Wings of the Dove", Bonham Carter finely walked a line between desperation and hedonism (and also performed her first nude scenes). Her imaginative and finely calibrated performance earned her a number of year-end critics' awards and spawned talk of an Oscar nomination. After a turn as a dowdy spinster in "Keep the Aspidistra Flying", she and Branagh reunited for the modern romance "Theory of Flight" (both 1998), in which she essayed a victim of motor neuron disease. And not forsaking period roles, Bonham Carter was the bewitching Morgan Le Fey opposite Sam Neill's "Merlin" (NBC, 1998).
In 1999, she once again left behind the petticoats and pretty frocks to essay a contemporary neurotic, a woman who attends various self-help groups just for a kick, opposite Edward Norton and Brad Pitt in the intriguing if not wholly satisfying "Fight Club". Bonham Carter easily made Marla a complex yet sexily engaging character and the change of pace made audiences and critics recognize anew her prodigious gifts. For her next high profile role -- that of the sympathetic Ari in the new adaptation of "Planet of the Apes" (2001) for director Tim Burton, the actress' pretty features were covered with simian makeup. Still, her expressive eyes and plummy voice made her recognizable and she once again offered a fine turn. Later that year, Bonham Carter once again played an alluring siren as a patient who drives her dentist (Steve Martin) into a world of sex, drugs and murder in the thriller "Novocaine" (2001).
In 2003, Bonham Carter was cast in Thaddeus O'Sullivan's "The Heart of Me". That same year, she lured Guy Pearce into a supernatural mystery as the enigmatic amnesiac, Ruby, in the haunting tale, "Till Human Voices Wake Us." Her personal relationship with Burton flourished as well as her professional relationship, in 2003 the couple had their first child and Bonham Carter appeared as a one-eyed witch with a glass eye in his appealing film "Big Fish." After the critical success of Big Fish, Bonham Carter reunited with Burton for his next film, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), a remake of the Mel Stuarts Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) that hewed closer to the original Roald Dahl novel, in which she played the downtrodden yet hopeful mother of the young protagonist Charlie Bucket (Freddie Highmore). Next for the actress were vocal roles in two popular films that happened to be stop-motion-animated: she provided the voice of the titular undead ghoul in her companion's macabre "Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride," as well as Lady Campanula Tottington, who hires the cheese-loving inventor and his faithful dog to battle a marauding veggie-chomping beast in "Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit" (both 2005).
Copyright © Baseline 2007.