Categories Helen Interviews Personal and Family Life Print Media

Helen Dishes More About the Lewis-McCrory Household – Aug 29, 2018

An Interview with Helen McCrory

by Tom Hodgkinson | Idler Magazine | August 28, 2019


I have met Helen McCrory before. She and her husband Damian Lewis are often to be seen at festivals, going to talks as everyday punters. In fact she gave me a compliment one year after I’d given a talk at Port Eliot Festival. I didn’t recognise her at first and just said “thanks”. As I wandered off I suddenly realised, “hang on, that was Helen McCrory!” Mutual friends told me that she and Damian were fans of my books, and I do remember them mentioning The Idle Parent in an interview. So I was delighted when her PR called and asked if we’d like an interview.

Tom Hodgkinson How did you get involved with Peaky Blinders?

Helen McCrory When they first approached me, they said: ‘Would you like to play Aunt Polly in this gangster drama set in Birmingham?” And I was like: “No.”

TH It sounded unappealing?

Continue reading Helen Dishes More About the Lewis-McCrory Household – Aug 29, 2018

Categories Helen Interviews Personal and Family Life Print Media Summertime

Damian and Helen Together On Stage Again? Hints Were Dropped! – Aug 9, 2019

Damian the Husband: Organizing Road Trips, Planning Surprise Birthday Parties

by Gavanndra Hodge | The Telegraph | August 9, 2019

She’s straight-talking, hates housework, dresses to kill, and lives life her way – convention be damned. Turns out Helen McCrory has plenty in common with her badass Peaky Blinders character Polly.

Helen McCrory, the multiple-award winning actor, is holding what looks like a moist slice of turkey. ‘What is that?’ I ask. ‘It’s a face mask, darling. £1.99 from Superdrug,’ she says, rubbing it against her neck. ‘It’s going to make me look like a teenager.’

We are standing outside a café on the Regent’s Canal, cyclists and prams whizzing by. McCrory is wearing a floral tea dress, silver Zadig & Voltaire boots, sunglasses and a VIP wristband from a Bob Dylan concert she went to, five days ago. ‘I am never taking it off,’ she says.

There is a sort of rock-star swagger to Helen McCrory, 50, a charismatic, don’t-give-a-damn cool with her chipped red nails and posh-voiced sweariness. She likes to party, to wear top hats and vintage frocks, and there is the inevitable doubling of glamour that comes from her marriage to the actor Damian Lewis (Brody from Homeland, more recently Bobby Axelrod in Billions), with whom she lives in a tall, narrow house in Tufnell Park with their children Manon, 12, and Gulliver, 11.

But what is most thrilling about McCrory is not the husky wit, the famous friends (‘Have you seen Andrew [Scott] doing Present Laughter? Now that is how you do Coward’) or the fact that she ran an acid jazz club in Islington one summer in the early 1990s – it is her talent.

She brings a furious precision and intensity to the roles she takes: Medea and ‘Lady M’ on stage; on screen, Anna Karenina, Narcissa Malfoy, Cherie Blair and the gangster matriarch Aunt Polly in Peaky Blinders, the fifth season of which is soon to start on BBC One. Critics compete for the glowing adjectives when describing her performances – ‘superb’, ‘majestic’, ‘simply wonderful’. In 2017 she was awarded an OBE for services to drama.

Continue reading Damian and Helen Together On Stage Again? Hints Were Dropped! – Aug 9, 2019