Compelling and poised
HELEN MCCRORY, who died of cancer on April 16 aged 52, was already established among the leading stage actors of her generation when she became known as Cherie Blair in Stephen Frears’ movie The Queen
(2006), with Michael Sheen as Tony; and as witch Narcissa Malfoy, mother of Draco, in the Harry Potter films.
Her brisk, slinky Cherie Blair was one in a line of suited authority figures and lawyers she played, culminating in a brutally frank but deluded Tory prime minister in David Hare’s television drama Roadkill (2020), refusing to give a “big job” to Hugh Laurie’s shameless MP. In comparison, Narcissa was a “turn,” a Gothic hoot, for all her verve and suffocating evil.
But it was her imperious matriarch Aunt Polly in Peaky Blinders (five series, 201319), ruling the roost in the interwar criminal Shelby family in Birmingham and keeping tabs on the illgotten gains, that suggested her roots in complex dramatic performance on the stage.
In her last two roles at the National Theatre, she was outstanding: as Euripides’ murderous Medea in Carrie Cracknell’s 2014 revival on the Olivier stage and as the emotionally ravaged Hester Collyer in Terence Rattigan’s
The Deep Blue Sea, revived in 2016 in the Lyttelton, also directed by Cracknell.
McCrory was small of stature but huge of spirit, ferocious, even feral, on the stage. She was always compelling and poised, coiled like a cobra, ready for the fray.
She played great roles: Belvedira in Otway’s Venice Preserved at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, in 1994; Anna in Pinter’s erotic dreamscape Old
Times at the Donmar Warehouse in 2004; Rebecca West in Ibsen’s
Rosmersholm (Freud’s favourite Ibsen play) at the Almeida in 2008.
Born in London, she was the eldest of three children of Iain McCrory, a Glaswegian diplomat from a Catholic background, and his wife, Ann (nee Morgans), a Cardiffborn physiotherapist from a Welsh Protestant family. The family was peripatetic due to her father’s postings abroad — in Cameroon, Tanzania, Norway and France.
Helen returned to Britain to attend Queenswood school, in Hatfield, Hertfordshire, where her acting talent was encouraged by drama teacher Thane Bettany (father of actor Paul
Bettany). She auditioned for the Drama Centre school in London and told the director who turned her down, Christopher Fettes, that she would apply every year until they admitted her. One year later, they did.
She made a professional debut at the Harrogate theatre in 1990, as Gwendolen Fairfax in The Importance of Being Earnest. Critics started sitting up when she played the flighty Lydia Bennet in Pride and Prejudice at the Royal Exchange in 1991.
McCrory knew how to build a performance over two or three hours, and she had the vocal and intellectual equipment to go to the limits. Even in Simon Callow’s overambitious staging of Les Enfants du Paradis for the RSC at the Barbican in 1996, she was gorgeous in the Arletty role of Garance. And she was both riveting and disturbing as the disguised princess — trying to combat political injustice but thwarted — in Marivaux’s Triumph of Love, translated by Martin Crimp and directed at the Almeida in 1999 by James Macdonald.
Sam Mendes signed off at the Donmar Warehouse in 2002 with a brilliant double of Uncle Vanya and
Twelfth Night. McCrory was Chekhov’s languorous Yelena and Shakespeare’s Olivia, charting a revelatory journey from mourning her father to coming alive, blazing sexily. The shows were a success in London and New York.
Another fire was lit in 2003 when she met Damian Lewis in rehearsals for Joanna Laurens’s eccentric verse play
Five Gold Rings, again at the Almeida, directed by Michael Attenborough. Off stage, they became a glamorous power couple; the one film credit they shared was in Richard Bracewell’s Bill (2015), Lewis naval bigwig Sir Richard Hawkins, McCrory Queen Elizabeth I.
She chipped in with another Tory MP in Mendes’s second Bond film, Skyfall (2012), and featured in Tom Hooper’s wartime horror film The Woman in Black: Angel of Death (2014). Her last movie was Loving Vincent (2017), “the first fully painted feature film” about the artist Van Gogh and the circumstances of his death.
McCrory married Lewis in 2007. Both were active patrons of charity Scene & Heard, which puts volunteer professional actors to work on scripts written by children in north London schools. They also raised more than £1 million for a charity arranging food for NHS staff during the pandemic. McCrory was appointed OBE in 2017.
She is survived by Lewis and their children, Manon and Gulliver. — Guardian News & Media