by Hugh Hart, wired.com (March 5, 2010)

HOLLYWOOD — Helena Bonham Carter rummages through a hotel refrigerator in search of nuts and candy bars for herself and a famished visitor. The night before, she’d appeared on screen in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland’s U.S. press premiere as a big-headed tyrant with goo-goo eyes, swelled forehead, bee-stung lips and tiny waist.

But even without the bulgy brow, Carter in person is every bit as striking as her digitally manipulated Red Queen doppleganger.

Dressed in combat boots and a silk sliplike frock, the actress, wild tangle of auburn hair framing her pale face, studies an early Carter-as-Red Queen sketch from the Museum of Modern Art’s catalog of Burton’s artwork and laughs:

“Oh wow, that’s it, the early sketch. Tim said, ‘You’ve got to play the Red Queen because I drew you.’ It’s like, ‘Really, is that me?’ He goes ‘Of course that’s you, and you’ve got to play her.’ I said, ‘Then of course I’ve got to play the Red Queen, for Tim.’”

Carter has played a lot of roles for Burton over the past decade.

Previously, she’d stunned audiences as a thinking man’s sex symbol in period pieces A Room With a View, Howard’s End and her Oscar-nominated star turn in The Wings of the Dove. And 1999’s dark Fight Club featured Carter as Ed Norton’s twisted girlfriend. Then, in 2000, she met Burton on the set of Planet of the Apes. A couple ever since, Carter and Burton moved into adjoining Victorian townhouses in London and now have two children, Billy Ray and Nell.

Describing day-to-day life with a man known for his outlandish imagination, Carter says: “Tim’s actually a quite sane person who doesn’t like combs, and me too. We have quite a normal existence. People would be surprised at how banal we are. We watch [English soap opera] EastEnders on the telly and most of the time he’s very tired because he’s always working.”

Usually he’s been working with Carter. Burton hired her to voice his stop-motion title character in 2005’s The Corpse Bride, then shunned experienced singing talent to cast Carter opposite Johnny Depp in his movie version of the Stephen Sondheim musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

For Alice in Wonderland, which opens Friday, Carter materialized on one of Burton’s sketch pads in the form of the Red Queen and there was no turning back.

“I’m not really interested in sci-fi, but as far as the fantastical, I’m sure Tim has indelibly affected me,” says Carter, who also played the villain Bellatrix Lestrange in the last couple of Harry Potter movies. “I can’t really see the seam between him and me but I’m sure he’s influenced my sense of humor and viewpoint on things. Hopefully I’ve done the same for him.”

At home with Tim Burton
In Alice, Carter’s Queen rules her court with absolute authority. Does art reflect reality regarding life in the Burton-Carter household?

“Yeah yeah, I am the boss. The Red Queen is Tim’s revenge,” she jokes. “‘I’m the boss at home, he’s the boss at work. I do the cooking, and he does the fetching. I make decisions, and he goes, ‘Yes dear.’”

On the movie set, of course, it’s a different story.

“Tim does most of the talking and telling and Johnny and I go ‘yep, yep, yep,’” Carter says. “Tim does not like intellectualizing and I think he’s right. It’s one of the things he’s taught me because I overanalyze and start to make things more difficult than they need to be. Then again, I take pleasure out of analyzing things. He’s much more intuitive. Tim knows how to trust his unconscious and let things marinate. He’s very good at trusting his unconscious.”

Unlike most of Burton’s previous guy-centric movies, Alice in Wonderland puts its young heroine and the dueling diva queens front and center.

“It’s funny that Tim even wanted to do it because usually he leaves ‘girly’ up to me,” Carter says. “When he said he wanted to do Alice in Wonderland, I’m like, ‘Yes! This is one for me. It’s for Nell. This is definitely one for the girls.’”

Carter says she can relate, in retrospect, to the coming-of-age crisis depicted by Mia Wasikowska’s Alice. “I remember what it was like when I was 19 and just starting out — I was just terrified of being defined all the time, of being judged. I was very limited by caring about what people thought of me.”

That was then, this is now.

“There comes a point where you just go, ‘Ultimately, I don’t really give a fuck any more,” she says. Restating the sentiment with a PG-rated term borrowed from the Mad Hatter’s “happy dance,” Carter, mother of two, concludes: “What happens when you have a baby, for me anyway, is I didn’t give a funderwhack any more.”

by Chitra Ramaswamy, the Scotsman (March 4, 2010)

HELENA BONHAM CARTER yawns, stretches out her little feet – encased in little black boots tied with little black ribbons – and yawns again. She giggles, takes a sip of tea, and fiddles with one of many gold fob watches around her neck. We’re in a suite at the Dorchester Hotel the day Alice in Wonderland premieres in London and Bonham Carter is on mischievous, if sleepy, form. The 43-year-old actress plays the bulbous-headed Red Queen in partner Tim Burton’s 3D gothic fantasia, but in pe

Today she’s the picture of high Victorian camp, which is how I imagine she dresses both for red carpets and cleaning carpets. Her heart-shaped face is crowned by a bird’s nest of hair that could only be rivalled in height and knottiness by Burton’s. Her dress looks like it fell out of Bram Stoker’s wardrobe into Vivienne Westwood’s hands. I’m guessing there are bloomers beneath those billowing skirts.

“I was Alice-like as a child, actually,” she says in that cut-glass accent that makes her pinched vowels sound as though they’ve been squeezed into a corset. “Quite precocious, absolutely. Dreaming out loud.” She stops to ponder, rubs one of her watch faces, and goes on. “The story of Alice is about finding out who you are. People are always telling her who she is, asking her to define herself. That’s kind of like today, everyone saying, ‘Tell us about you?’” Bonham Carter makes a face as if to say she just about tolerates the absurd business of promoting films in anonymous swish hotels. “It’s all Bonkersland.”

Ironically, bonkers is the word most often used to describe Bonham Carter. It’s her metamorphosis from Merchant Ivory English rose to Tim Burton black orchid; the way she dresses like a sexy Miss Havisham; the fact she and Burton live in separate houses, with outrageous reports claiming they are connected by an underground passageway lit by candles and patrolled by bats. Actually, their living arrangements sound sensible: they get to watch telly together and spend time with their two children, but she doesn’t have to tolerate his insomnia, and he can close the door on her constant chatter. “It works ideally,” she agrees. “I’ve got nothing but good things to say about it.” How do their houses differ? “He says his is very James Bond but it’s more Tim Burton, about as original as his films,” she says. “My house looks like Wonderland. I’ve got fob watches and clocks of different sizes, lots of black-and-white tea sets.

“I’ve always loved watches and keys and key-rings and keyholes. They fascinate me. And hats. And little doors. I’ve got little doors in my garden. And pigs. I wish I had a pig. ‘Bonham’ actually means ‘little pig’ in middle English. I’ve been thinking about getting a micro pig. Do you think I should?”

Thank God for Helena Bonham Carter. While other actors fawn over their co-stars and come over all earnest about the latest charitable cause, Bonham Carter is off on a stream of consciousness about pigs. The Red Queen, a deliciously nasty creation who Bonham Carter based on Elizabeth I as played by Bette Davis with a little of their toddler Nell thrown in, likes to use a live upturned pig for a footstool. And so, it seems, would Bonham Carter.

Why did Burton, whom she first worked with on Planet of the Apes, see her as the balloon-headed baddie? “I didn’t really understand what Tim meant by Red Queen,” she says. “Then I read ‘enter queen, has huge oversized head, very angry…’ and thought, ‘So that’s how he sees me’.” She laughs, as she does at the finish of most of her sentences.

“What was your question? Oh yes. I don’t look at these characters and think ‘villain’. I look at them and think ‘mentally ill people’. And I love mentally ill people. They’re the most interesting to play. I see Bellatrix Lestrange (her character in the Harry Potter franchise] as damaged, not evil.”

On set the atmosphere was “playful”, unlike when they worked together on Sweeney Todd and Bonham Carter, heavily pregnant, ended up nicknaming Burton Big Chief Little Patience, while he called her Little Squaw Running Mouth.

“Possibly it was less tense because I had to scream all the time as the Red Queen so I got rid of any tension,” she laughs. “I didn’t have a voice after midday and that was ideal for him. I just stayed silent. Perfect! He had a Nerf Gun, so he shot me routinely. I shot him back with a machine-gun lighting gave me. It was good fun.” Are they good at leaving their worries on set? “We have to,” she shrugs. “You can’t talk about things at home. He needs to get his head away, and I do too. We just watch the news in my house.”

What Bonham Carter is interested in is transformation. Since she started working with Burton, she has altered herself more and more. In Planet of the Apes she was a chimpanzee, in Big Fish she played an old witch with an eye patch, in Sweeney Todd she was a murderous pie-maker, and as Bellatrix Lestrange she wears falsies. Now, of course, there’s the giant head. It would be easy to attribute all of this to a reaction against her “pretty” days as Merchant Ivory’s poster girl, but there’s more to it than that.

“In my first conversation with Tim, he said: ‘I don’t know you but you were the first person I thought of to play a chimpanzee,’” she says. “He had this hunch that I like to cover myself up. He was absolutely right. It’s always such a relief not to look like me. That’s why I got into acting, to escape me. And that’s the frustrating thing with acting. You think you’re losing yourself, being somebody else, changing your identity. Then you look at the film and think, ‘It’s still me’.”

She loathes this feeling so much she avoids watching herself on screen. “I hadn’t seen Alice and had to dub it. I thought, ‘This isn’t so bad. Usually I get really depressed when I’m dubbing something, but it was OK because I don’t look like me.”

Why doesn’t she want to look like herself? “Johnny does the same thing,” she muses of her co-star Johnny Depp, who she and Burton jokily refer to as the director’s first love. “I know we’re both in it to get away from ourselves. We’ve got a healthy amount of self-loathing I guess, which sparks the whole escapism thing. We like covering ourselves up. We’ve got the same urges. Ultimately it’s more to do with escapism rather than reacting to perceptions of me. I don’t think I really form my behaviour in reaction to what other people think.” She chuckles, fully aware that she’s stating the obvious.

Bonham Carter, the great-granddaughter of Liberal prime minister Herbert Asquith, got herself an agent when she was just 13. Her father, a prominent banker, had suffered a stroke that left him in a wheelchair and she felt she had to help out, and strike out. It sounds as if she had an old head on young shoulders – like Alice, in fact – but these days the opposite is true. Perhaps Burton is her rabbit hole, the person who keeps her imagination fertile, her attitude non-conformist, her mindset young.

“Possibly,” she says. “I think it’s something to do with getting older too. One is much more relaxed. It’s about finding your own sense of self and not being what other people want you to be. We’re definitely a couple of big kids, and that ties us together. We’re the same age emotionally.” And what age would that be? “Well, it varies throughout the day,” she says. “Sometimes we can be old and wise, but really the oldest we get is about 12.”

by Geoff Boucher, the L. A. Times (March 2, 2010)

When Tim Burton finally made the surprise proposal, Helena Bonham Carter was touched by how shy and befuddled he sounded. “He was so polite about it, and there were so many hesitations,” Bonham Carter said. “He said, ‘Would you consider, um, possibly, perhaps — but only if you want to — um, anyway, would you play the Red Queen?’ ”

Bonham Carter, who has a nine-year romance and two children with Burton, giggled as she recounted the moment when she was invited to take on the royal role in “Alice in Wonderland,” the highly anticipated Disney film that opens Friday.

“It was like a proposal of marriage,” said the 43-year-old actress. Bonham is routinely misidentified as Burton’s wife.

“I was doing ‘Terminator Salvation’ at the time, and when he asked me, I was really flattered. It was a complete surprise! I know people think it’s disingenuous when I say that, but it’s true. They won’t understand this, but each time [he has a film], I truly don’t expect Tim to ever want to work with me again.”

That — like the shrinking potion in “Alice” — is a bit difficult to swallow. It will be 25 years ago this December that Bonham Carter had her career breakthrough in the role of Lucy Honeychurch in “A Room With a View,” and she has put together an eclectic list of credits with films such as “The Wings of a Dove” (which earned her an Oscar nomination), “Fight Club,” Franco Zeffirelli’s “Hamlet” and two “Harry Potter” films (with two more coming). Then, of course, there are movies she has made with Burton — “Alice” is the sixth since 2001, and in that span she has been a talking simian (”Planet of the Apes”), a moldering, undead woman (”Corpse Bride”) and, now, in “Wonderland,” a shrill queen with an abnormally swollen skull.

“I personally find it especially flattering that he tends to deform me in every movie,” Bonham Carter said. “But my mother and everyone asks me, ‘What is it with you and him?’ But that’s the point of acting isn’t it? It’s all dress-up.”

This time, the dress-up adventure is a surreal jaunt through Wonderland, in which Johnny Depp is the Mad Hatter, newcomer Mia Wasikowska handles the title role, and a deep roster of British actors (among them Alan Rickman, Michael Sheen and Stephen Fry) give voice to the unsettling animal kingdom on the other side of the rabbit hole.

No one has more memorable scenes, though, than Bonham Carter, whose role is a heady one, to say the least. A special camera and digital wizardry were used to magnify the star’s head, and the effect is a bit jolting to watch. In the plot, the queen’s monstrous noggin makes her a freak even by Wonderland’s standards.

For the record, Burton didn’t mention the major-league melon when he made his sweet proposal. “I learned that when I read it in the script,” Bonham Carter said with mock distress. “Oh, a huge head? I see, lovely.”

The film is a mix of live-action performance, green-screen motion-capture work and pure animation, which made for a dizzying amount of computation, crisis control and collaboration from Burton’s team. On the set, for instance, someone had to keep track of where the Red Queen’s mega-cranium would be in relation to doorways, furniture and other actors.

“The queen’s head was something we had to be careful to account for all the time,” visual-effects supervisor Ken Ralston said. “We had to remind people to back away from Helena in their scenes to give her head enough room.”

Burton said the key to the Red Queen was to make sure she wasn’t entirely evil or predictable and that her rivalry with her normal-headed sister, the White Queen (played by Anne Hathaway), would draw in the audience. He also tapped into some startling real-world inspirations for his bellowing Red Queen.

“In a lot of children’s literature and other literature, it’s kind of the same thing over and over — there’s good queens and bad queens, and here you have that, but the elements are a bit blurred,” Burton said. “Everybody’s weird and has weird qualities to them [in Wonderland]. She’s kind of a mixture. When I look at her now, she reminds me of pictures I’ve seen of Leona Helmsley. There’s a tiny bit of elements of my mother in there too, for some strange reason. And Helena brings her own things to it too.”

Linda Woolverton, the screenwriter for “Alice,” says the Red Queen grew up with a tumor in her head, which, in Wonderland’s version of physiology, made her head vast. “Linda told me it also made the queen emotionally volatile and arrested in her development,” Bonham Carter said with something close to sympathy. “We have a 2-year-old daughter, Nell. There are some similarities.”

Bonham Carter says some moviegoers will be surprised to learn that this new film is more like a sequel to Lewis Carroll’s familiar tales of Alice than a remake of, say, the 1951 Disney film or an updating of the many stage productions through the decades.

“Tim has changed things, and some purists will just slit their wrists when they see it,” she said, chuckling at her own gruesome imagery. “It’s all very invented, very new with this film and with good reason. The original Carroll stories are in fact very episodic — there isn’t a lot of huge narrative or dramatic drive. The story that Linda Woolverton invented is a mixture, it’s stolen from both [books by Carroll] but given a real context and a story and a purpose for the whole dream to occur.”

Bonham Carter says she doesn’t remember her own first encounters with Alice as a child. The Carroll images seemed more ambient in childhood.

“She’s so been around,” Bonham Carter said. “She’s definitely mythic. I can’t really remember how I first came to the story. I’ve always just had random impressions of it, the symbols and imagery, they’re just stuck with me. They’ve always entranced me — like the door and the keyhole and the ‘drink me’ potion and the ‘eat me’ cake.
“What is it about Alice? Why do we respond to it, and why does it still captivate us?”

Bonham Carter said an intriguing resonance of Carroll’s classic tales was the self-awareness that Alice had as she meandered through the exotic absurdity of Wonderland.

“She knows she’s in a dream, and we all know that feeling,” the actress said. “And the changing of size, there’s something in that too, the way children feel in an adult world or the way they fantasize about growing large and visible or to shrink away and be away from it.”

Bonham Carter’s early career had so many period pieces (”Lady Jane,” “Howards End,” “Where Eagles Fear to Tread,” etc.) that she was viewed as a “corset queen” and, with some sourness, noted that she might have considered having some ribs removed to better handle the wardrobe demands of typecasting. Now, though, with Burton and the “Potter” influence, she has taken a sharp turn into the world of fantasy and special effects. She is still leery, though, of letting technology get top billing above story and acting.

“I haven’t seen too many 3D movies, for instance, and I don’t think they all work that well, but I think with this one, with ‘Alice,’ it’s a perfect marriage of 3D and subject matter. I think with a lot of the 3D films, it’s a bit gratuitous. But with this story, you have all the shrinking and changing of size so there’s an opportunity to use the technology in an interesting way.”

The technology does have some negative side effects though. Burton, it turns out, can’t really see his beloved the same way he used to. “Oh, it’s true, I can’t even look at Helena anymore because now her real head just seems like a small orange,” the director deadpanned. “It’s like she’s got some shrunken head. It’s sad.”

by Bryan Alexander

There’s so much to cheer for in Tim Burton’s upcoming “Alice in Wonderland” release. A surreal fantasy world with strange characters like Johnny Depp taking on the only slightly crazier Mad Hatter, for starters.

But after Thursday’s L.A. press screening, it’s clear the scene stealer is Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen. The Red Queen is more than a murderous and tyrannical ruler — she’s essentially a spoiled six-year-old with the power of life and death in her hands. She wields this power with evil relish.

Best of all, her targets are cuddly animals or anyone who happens to have the poor fortune of being more physically attractive than her — and clearly in any kingdom there are going to be a lot of critters in both categories. She uses the old-school off-with-their-heads mantra with impetuous regularity. But most of her other tortures show Burton-esque genius, such as a flamingo calmly accepting his fate as a mallet in a lawn polo game where the ball is actually a porcupine.

She derives joy calling out for a pig foot rest and demands her large guest take a chair consisting of a shivering monkey holding a platform. Even her flatterers ugly themselves up with fake massive noses and forehead additions.

The Red Queen might be fighting for her crown against her arch-perfect sister the White Queen (played with over-the-top perfection by Anne Hathaway). But in the baddie world, Helena Bonham Carter is the Queen of Dark Hearts.

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The following pic was taken on September 18, 2009 in London:

source: celebrity-gossip.net

from the Daily Mail, September 18, 2009.

by Baz Bamigboye

Helena Bonham Carter, better known as Bellatrix Lestrange to Harry Potter movie fans, is in negotiations to portray the Queen Mother in a film about how she helped her husband overcome his stammer.

The actress will star with Colin Firth – as George VI – and Oscar winner Geoffrey Rush in the film The King’s Speech, which Tom Hooper will direct.

Firth told me Bonham Carter would be ’sublime as the Queen Mum’. ‘The film takes place before she took on the cuddly Queen Mum mantle, when she was much younger, making Helena ideal.

‘This was when her husband – then the Duke of York – was going through the Abdication crisis and had to prepare himself for public speaking.’

We were talking in Toronto, where the actor was attending the city’s international film festival, to promote his new movie – and designer Tom Ford’s directorial debut – A Single Man.

Firth gives the performance of his career in the film and I predict he will become a serious Academy Award contender for best actor.

The King’s Speech starts shooting in London this autumn. Bonham Carter’s schedule is being negotiated because she’s also working on The Deathly Hallows – the two-film finale of the Harry Potter series – plus she has a starring role as the Red Queen in Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland.

The King’s Speech is about Lionel Logue (played by Rush), an Australian speech therapist who later became a sought-after Harley Street consultant.

In 1926 the Duchess of York, as the Queen Mother was before her husband assumed the throne in 1937, encouraged the Duke to visit Logue, and then helped him with breathing exercises and tongue-twisters.

Later, Logue coached George VI for the formal language of the 1937 Coronation, telling him to ‘take it quietly, Sir’ – and that slow, measured speech later became a reassuring feature of the King’s wartime radio broadcasts.

A Single Man, meanwhile, is based on a novel by Christopher Isherwood, about an Englishman teaching literature at a university in California.

He feels isolated but discovers that it’s the little things in daily life that make you happy.

It’s beautifully shot and directed. After a screening in Toronto, Firth joked he had been ’scheduled a renaissance for about now, particularly as I’ve had my 49th birthday’.

Indeed, Firth, known for roles in television’s Pride And Prejudice and on the big screen for Bridget Jones and Mamma Mia! has been turning in some finely observed portraits in smaller movies such as Genova, And When Did You Last See Your Father?, the current Dorian Gray and now A Single Man.

Here’s the first teaser for “Alice in Wonderland”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_bJF_teaS4

Better late than never… Here are some pics from the UK premiere of “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince”. They were taken on July 7, 2009 in London.

The Mirror, July 12, 2009

by Mark Adams

THE STARS
Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint, Michael Gambon, Alan Rickman, Helena Bonham Carter, Robbie Coltrane.

THE STORY
With Death Eaters causing havoc in both the Muggle – human – and wizarding worlds, special magical protections are put around Hogwarts School to keep the students safe.

Dumbledore (Gambon) needs Harry (Radcliffe) to help find vital clues to defeat Voldemort… but Harry is equally concerned about dangers within Hogwarts as well as getting increasingly interested in the attractions of the opposite sex.

THE VERDICT
The Harry Potter films just get better and better… Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is a wonderful wizarding adventure, brimming with action, love, drama, humour and dazzling performances. It is cracking stuff and bound to be the hit of the summer.

Though it should come as no real surprise, the young stars are looking awfully grown-up as they grapple adult issues as well as try to get to grips with their own pesky hormones. If love ‘n’ romance was a minor element in the last film, it emerges as a major player this time round.

Things start powerfully in this latest instalment as both Muggle and wizarding worlds are under attack from dastardly Death Eaters. London is in peril as the boundaries between human and magical grow more precarious.

Just as Harry is about to embark on a possible Brief Encounter-style romance with a girl from a railway station café, he is whisked off by Dumbledore to recruit Horace Slughorn (Broadbent) to return as a professor at Hogwarts. As we find out, Slughorn holds important secrets which offer clues to defeating Voldemort. Broadbent is a perfect addition to the magical teaching staff: wonderfully witty and whimsical.

Hogwarts School now feels more like a dusty castle than a fairytale playground. There is a sense of danger lurking and the film is all the better for the darker, more grown-up undercurrents.

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Most fun, though, is to be had with the troubled teenage trysts as love and jealousy start to play havoc with young emotions. Quite why lovely, bright Hermione (Watson) longs for bumbling Ron (Grint) is a mystery, but as he becomes an unlikely sex symbol due to his Quidditch exploits, Harry offers a shoulder to cry on.

Mind you, he has his own romantic issues as he finds himself falling for Ron’s feisty younger sister Ginny (Bonnie Wright).

The film builds to a powerful climax as the Death Eaters find a way into Hogwarts and face off against Dumbledore. Look out for Helena Bonham Carter, who is astonishingly evil and mesmerising as Bellatrix Lestrange.

The film looks magnificent, is wonderfully acted and despite its hefty running time never feels too long. We wait now for the two-part film of the climactic book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows…