THE INADVERTENT FEMINIST
Helena Bonham Carter ’s film latest ignited her fighting spirit and set her at odds with her sexist ancestors
If Helena Bonham Carter had been alive in 1912, during the height of Britain’s campaign for women’s suffrage, she would have been in a quandary.
The 49- year- old actress might well have been carrying “Right to Vote” signs and going on hunger strikes in prison. However, the man whose point of view she would have had to change was her greatgrandfather, Lord Herbert Asquith. At the time he was Britain’s prime minister, and he was actively opposed to the suffragettes. So was his daughter Violet, Bonham Carter’s grandmother. “It was a weird encounter with my forebears,” Bonham Carter said. She was talking about Suffragette, a new film which opens on Thursday. Meryl Streep stars as the iconic suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst, with Carey Mulligan as a laundry worker who joins the fight. Bonham Carter plays Edith Ellyn, a committed suffragette who works as a pharmacist while her supportive husband fronts the business. The pharmacy is a meeting place and shelter, with Edith serving as den mother.
To explain herself to a new recruit to the cause, Edith says: “I wanted to be a doctor, but I was born the wrong sex.”
Originally the character was to be named Caroline. After reading about a suffragette named Edith Garrud, however, Bonham Carter asked director Sarah Gavron if she could change her character’s name to Edith.
“Edith was four-foot-11,” said the actress, who is five-foot-two, or 157cm. “She trained the 30 women bodyguards who protected Emmeline Pankhurst. She taught them jiujitsu to help them deal with the huge amount of physical abuse. Unfortunately that scene was cut from the movie.”
Another missing scene is the one featuring Bonham Carter’s brother, Edward, as their great-grandfather, Lord Asquith. She got Edward the job.
“Edward looks a little like Asquith,” the actress said, speaking by telephone from her home in London. “He bleached his hair grey, and I had to throw horse manure at him. It was odd to have this argument with my dead great-grandfather: ‘What were you thinking, not giving us the vote? We were incredibly useful and absolutely essential to the upkeep of the country.’ ”
The first women’s suffrage bill was defeated in parliament in 1870. Women’s suffrage groups began forming in the late 1880s, but it wasn’t until 1928 that British women finally got the right to vote. American women had got the vote in 1920.
Bonham Carter was educated at Westminster School, one of England’s top secondary schools. Even so, she admitted, she had been unfamiliar with the details of the suffrage movement until she began work on the film.
“I didn’t know about the hunger strikes or the police surveillance,” Bonham Carter said, “and I had only a vague notion about the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’ that was passed, unfortunately, by my great-grandfather.”
That act, officially known as the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act 1913, was aimed at keeping suffragettes from becoming martyrs by starving themselves to death. It provided for the release of prisoners whose lives had been endangered by hunger strikes, but stipulated that they be returned to prison as soon as their health had recovered sufficiently.
“What would I have done back then?” Bonham Carter wondered. “I had the luck of geography and birth. I’ve never encountered any discrimination because I’m a woman. If I’d been in a position of extreme frustration and not being listened to, it could have been different. I’m pretty direct. Life’s too short not to be.
“My father never treated me any differently from my brothers,” she added. “I went to school and I was allowed to have a career and do what I wanted.” Bonham Carter always has been focused on goals. “At 14 I was very precocious and pushy,” she recalled. “I was very aware that, if I could get an agent, I could be different. I could get an earlier start.
“Also,” she admitted, “I wanted to show off and get attention. I had no real idea what I was about, but you can get far on confidence.” She turned to the telephone book and found a list of agents. “I just sent a photo and said how tall I was,” she continued. “Then I phoned up the first one, and she said, ‘OK’. I didn’t get anything really — one advertisement and one play.”
Then director Trevor Nunn, who was searching for an actress to play Lady Jane Grey, who enjoyed a nine-day reign as queen of England in 1553, in Lady Jane (1986), noticed a picture of Bonham Carter in the British society magazine Tatler. Before that film had been made, however,
James Ivory hired her to play Lucy Honeychurch in A Room with a View (1985). That film was released first, became an international art-house hit and launched her career.
Since then Bonham Carter has appeared in more than 50 features, including such notables as Fight Club (1999) and The King’s Speech (2005), for which she received an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress. She previously had received a nomination as Best Actress for her work in The Wings of the Dove (1997).
She is perhaps best known, at least in some circles, for having played the evil Bellatrix Lestrange in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007), Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009) and the two-part Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2010-2011). “I basically act to try to avoid being me,” Bonham Carter said. “It’s a holiday from myself. I never want to repeat myself, because I get bored so easily.”
Suffragette gave her the opportunity to do something personally meaningful.
“Very few films might be worth telling, stories that are more than entertainment,” she said. “It’s amazing that this one hasn’t been told yet.” Being part of Suffragette transformed Bonham Carter into a feminist. “When I started this film, I didn’t think I was,” the actress admitted. “Now I’m an inadvertent feminist.
“I’m sure there are feminists out there who don’t realise it,” she continued. “I’m sure they don’t think they’re inferior to men. As long as you think you’re everybody’s equal, then you’re a feminist. ‘Feminist’ does not mean ‘man-hating’.
“A lot of women these days feel that the fight is over, but it depends on where you’re born,” she added. “Look at Malala, the young [Pakistani] woman who took a bullet because she wanted to be educated.”
Bonham Carter’s familial connection to Suffragette prompted her to examine her family tree more closely.
“My great-grandfather was apparently a very intelligent man,” she said, “but he said that women didn’t deserve the vote because we weren’t strong enough to defend our own country were it ever to be attacked. That’s such an idiotic, unintelligent argument.”
Bonham Carter also was surprised to discover her grandmother’s antipathy toward the suffragettes.
“She died when I was three,” the actress said, “but I got to know her posthumously from her letters. She really was a formidable woman and was in the House of Lords.
“I asked my mother, who was very close to her, ‘Why was Violet anti-suffragette?’ She said, ‘I really think she was more respected than her brothers. She was the main confidante of her father. She felt there was no difference between men and women, even though she had no vote’. ”
Bonham Carter’s history lesson got personal when she met Emmeline Pankhurst’s great-granddaughter, Helen.
“I had to apologise to her,” the actress said, “and say, ‘I’m really sorry. I’m trying to redress it’. ”
At the time Suffragette was made, Bonham Carter recently had separated from director Tim Burton, the father of her two children, 12-yearold Billy Ray and seven-year-old Nell.
The two met when he cast her in Planet of the Apes (2001). They went on to make six more films together: Big Fish (2003), Corpse Bride (2005), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), Alice in Wonderland (2010) and Dark Shadows (2012). Burton is one of the producers of Alice Through the Looking Glass, scheduled to open in 2016, in which Bonham Carter will recreate her role from Alice in Wonderland. He is not directing it, however.
“The Red Queen is great fun to redo,” she said. “She’s a spoiled child and very angry. When you find somebody you enjoy being inside of, it’s like putting on a pair of old shoes.
“Last year I spent being very angry doing Suffragette and playing the Red Queen,” Bonham Carter said. “I didn’t have a voice by the end, because I was shouting for so long. It was very therapeutic.”