McCrory, of ‘Peaky,’ is dead at 52

Helen McCrory, the award-winning British actress best known for her sharp-witted roles in the BBC gangster drama “Peaky Blinders” and the final three “Harry Potter” films, has died, her husband said Friday. She was 52 and had been suffering from cancer.

Her husband, fellow actor Damian Lewis, said McCrory died “peacefully at home” after a “heroic battle with cancer.”

“She died as she lived. Fearlessly,” Lewis wrote on Twitter. “God we love her and know how lucky we are to have had her in our lives. She blazed so brightly. Go now, Little One, into the air, and thank you.”

McCrory (photo) was one of Britain’s most respected actors, making her mark by playing a succession of formidable and sometimes fearsome women.

She is perhaps best known for her “Peaky Blinders” role as Aunt Polly, the tough-talking matriarch figure keeping a rowdy crime family in order in the aftermath of WWI.

She also played Evelyn Poole in the British-American horror drama “Penny Dreadful” and won the Critics’ Circle Theatre Award for best actress in 2015 for her role in playing the vengeful Greek heroin “Medea” at the National Theatre.

McCrory also starred as a human-rights lawyer dragged into international intrigue in the TV thriller “Fearless,” played lawyer Cherie Blair, wife of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in the 2006 movie “The Queen,” and had roles in Martin Scorsese’s film “Hugo” and the James Bond thriller “Skyfall.”

Actor Michael Sheen, who played Tony Blair in “The Queen,” said McCrory was “so funny, so passionate, so smart and one of the greatest actors of our time.”

She had a knack for turning her characters into intimidating and impressive women with her trademark tenacity.

“There are a lot of things I turn down,” McCrory told Associated Press in 2016.

She said roles she tended to pass on were ones where “all your lines are ‘But what did you do at work?’ ‘That’s so clever, darling.’ ”

She is survived by Lewis, 50, and their two children.