British star Helen McCrory dies at 52
She was acclaimed for roles in ‘Peaky Blinders’ and the ‘Harry Potter’ franchise
Helen McCrory, the accomplished and versatile British stage and screen actress who played Narcissa Malfoy in three Harry Potter films and the matriarch Polly Gray on the BBC series “Peaky Blinders,” in addition to earning critical plaudits for her stage work, has died at her home in north London. She was 52.
Her death, from, cancer, was announced on social media on Friday by her husband, actor Damian Lewis.
McCrory was a familiar face to London theatre audiences and to British television and film viewers well before she won wider recognition in the Harry Potter movies. She began her career in the theatre in 1990, straight out of drama school, playing Gwendolen in a production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest in Harrogate, Yorkshire. In 1993, the director Richard Eyre, who was the head of the National Theater, cast her in the leading role in his production of Arthur Wing Pinero’s comic play Trelawny of the ‘Wells,’ for which she earned glowing reviews. “Helen McCrory, in the title role, perfectly captures Rose’s crossover from a lovelorn ingenue to wounded woman,”
Sheridan Morley wrote in The International Herald Tribune. The next year she played Nina in Chekhov’s The Seagull at the National Theater, and in 1995 she was named “most promising newcomer” in the Shakespeare Globe Awards for her portrayal of Lady Macbeth.
McCrory worked steadily in the theatre over the next two decades, with notable appearances as Yelena in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in 2002; as Rosalind in As You Like It in 2005 (which earned her an Olivier Award nomination for best actress); as Rebecca West in Ibsen’s “Rosmersholm” in 2008; and as Medea in 2016. “Portrayed with unsettling accessibility and nerves of piano wire by Helen McCrory,” Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times, “the Medea of ancient myth has become the sad but scary crazy lady next door, the kind who inspires you to lock up your children.”
But as early as 1994, McCrory was also venturing into film and television work.
In 2003 she appeared as Barbara Villiers, the mistress of Charles II, in Joe Wright’s four-part series Charles II: The Power and the Passion, and in 2006 she made a cameo appearance as Cherie Blair, the wife of Prime Minister Tony Blair, in Stephen Frears’ The Queen
— a role she reprised in the 2010 film The Special Relationship, written, as was The Queen, by Peter Morgan.
McCrory became known to worldwide audiences through her 2009 role as Narcissa Malfoy, the mother of Harry’s nemesis, Draco Malfoy, in Harry Potter and the HalfBlood Prince.
She was good at playing villains — the evil alien Rosanna Calvierri in an episode of Doctor Who,
the spiritualist Evelyn Poole in the series Penny Dreadful, and, perhaps most notably, Polly Gray, the aunt of the gang boss Tommy Shelby, on the period crime drama Peaky Blinders, a role she played for its five-season run from 2013 to 2019.
Being an actress “was the only thing I wanted to be,” she told The Times of London in 2017, adding that she had been “incredibly lucky” to be quickly given major roles.
McCrory met Lewis in 2003, when they were both appearing in Joanna Laurens’ Five Gold Rings
at the Almeida Theater in London. “Damian’s naughty, and I’ve always loved my naughty boys,” she said last year on the BBC 4 radio programme Desert Island Discs.
They had two children, Manon in 2006 and Gulliver in 2007, and married in 2007. Although Lewis also found fame, on the television series Homeland and Billions, they maintained a low-key life in London.
Her illness was not widely known, and her death came as a surprise to most. es
Quote Unquote
“To me, ‘Helen McCrory, 47’ means nothing. ‘Helen McCrory, bad housewife and argumentative after a bottle of gin’ would be much more relevant.” —Helen McCrory, actress