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Corset still makes sense

Interview: Helena Bonham Carter

James Rampton
Saturday 10 January 1998 00:02 GMT
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Helena Bonham Carter feared that her appearance in yet another corsets-and-carriages spectacular would spark a flurry of press criticism. She need not have worried: her latest role in The Wings of the Dove led The Guardian's critic to praise her transformation from `tiresome little snit in period costume to a romantic figure of complexity and conviction'. It could even bag her an Oscar

In one of the very first scenes in The Wings of the Dove, Iain Softley's adaptation of the Henry James novel, Maude (Charlotte Rampling), the snooty aunt of Kate Croy (Helena Bonham Carter), watches her niece doing her make-up in the mirror. Maude peers disdainfully over Kate's shoulder and sneers: "too much powder".

For many, this will stand as a comment on Bonham Carter's entire career, which seems to have been spent caked in an excessive amount of period make-up.

"The critics are a worry," she says openly. "We're really bad at supporting costume dramas here. The kneejerk reaction is always to slag them off with `boring, not proper filmmaking, looks nice, but that's not enough'. Added to that is the bane of me, Mrs Merchant Ivory mascot. It's easy to dismiss."

All too conscious of this, Bonham Carter admits to agonising long and hard before accepting the role of the Machiavellian Kate, who sets up her beloved Merton (Linus Roache) with her rich but terminally-ill best friend, Millie (Alison Elliott), so she can net Millie's fortune on her death. "My own diffidence about the part was because it was another Edwardian costume drama, and I'm well aware that I'd already done one too many of those for my own good."

But in the end, she reckoned, "stuff the critics, let's act." "That sort of negative response to me has been going on for years now," she sighs, "so I said to myself, `I'll just carry on my own way.' You can't have your choices dictated by what pleases other people, because then you're really on a non-starter. The temptation is to start getting self-conscious about your press image. But it's stupid to be frightened about being typecast, because it's an actuality that I've already been typecast."

For her, it's not the width of the garment that matters, but the quality. "As typecasting goes, I do get good parts," Bonham Carter asserts. "Although they're all in the same era and fashion and hair, they're actually very different, subtle and complex characters. Contemporary scripts come my way, and people say `do them because they're modern'. But I'm not going to do something crap just because it's modern.

"The thing is that costume dramas provide good parts for women," she continues. "The characters are already full-developed, multi-dimensional. It is much harder to develop one straight off in a screenplay. Plus the great novels of the 19th and early 20th centuries are full of exceptional female characters who are often more enthralling than women in contemporary stories."

That is very much the case with Kate Croy in The Wings of the Dove. "The women I play are usually innocent ingenues. Kate is definitely not that," Bonham Carter states. "She's more of a baddie, manipulative, exploitative and femme-fataley."

For the first time, the film affords Bonham Carter the chance to really let rip on screen. As a suitor watches Kate scheming, he rightly surmises that "there's far too much going on behind those pretty lashes."

The end of The Wings of the Dove also gives Bonham Carter her first, full-frontal, corset-off love scene. This passionate sequence was, the actress claims, "the most embarrassing thing I've ever done. I kept thinking, `if the audience don't care about these characters, then I'll have taken my clothes off for nothing'."

She needn't have worried, it has not been in vain. For this seems to be the film that has finally allowed Bonham Carter to escape from headlines asking "can she act?". "In the past I have been cast for what I look like," she confesses. "Even when I cut my hair off, they just stick it back on again. They've got it in a box next door. The irony is that I was always cast as the girl with the hair even though I never had any. If you're a young actress, you're going to be one half of a love story and cast for your looks. Then you hit 30 and all that changes."

Bonham Carter is a likeable interviewee, and - here's the surprise - a good laugh. Given the intrusions that she and her partner Kenneth Branagh have suffered, however, it is hardly surprising that she remains wary of journalists. "People see me as quite other," she declares. "It's an image conjured up by my name, the hair, and being quite posh."

She has obviously dwelt in some detail on the subject of why reporters are so addicted to knocking down the celebrities they have built up. "Journalists do it out of boredom. They think, `oh no, her again.' I apologise for not being bottomlessly interesting," she laughs.

She may have to call on her reservoirs of humour again if she is not nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for The Wings of the Dove, such has been the hype. Time Out has called her performance "a revelation", and she has already laid down three pretty good Academy Award markers by winning Best Actress gongs from the Boston Critics, the LA Critics and The National Board of Review. She has also secured a nomination for a Golden Globe Award - an even more reliable indicator for the Oscars.

"You don't want to presume about the Oscars, but it's heady stuff," Bonham Carter says. "You've got to keep your feet on the ground, but it's nice to get a pat on the back. I've got people around me who are jumping up and down about it, but I don't want to say anything out of superstition. I feel in a strange, semi-limbo, a sort of hazy bubble, like being at a party where I haven't had my first drink yet. You think awards are all about attracting attention and money for the industry, and that the very idea of `best' is spurious. But `best' still sounds nice for a day. I'll live with that."

So can she act? You bet.

The Wings of the Dove is currently on release

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