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CARTER, HELENA BONHAM (1966– ). British actress.
Provided voice for animation: Brown Bear's Wedding (tv movie)
(1991); White Bear's Secret (tv movie) (1992); Carnivale (Deane
Taylor 2000); Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
(Steve Box and Nick Park 2005); Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
(video game) (2005); Corpse Bride (Burton and Nick Johnson 2005); The
Gruffalo (tv short) (Max Lang and Jakob Schuh 2009); The Gruffalo's
Child (Uwe Heidschötter and Johannes Weiland 2011).
However, like her character in A Room with a View, Carter
evidently harbored a secret desire to break away from being prim and proper,
and amidst several additional roles of the sorts we can come to expect, some
strangeness began creeping into her filmography during the 1990s: the imperiled
bride in Frankenstein, Morgan le Fey in a television adaptation of Merlin,
and the token romantic interest in that very odd fantasy, Fight Club. An
apparently firm shift to a career of walking on the wild side came when she
established a romantic relationship with Tim
BURTON and started to appear in almost all of that distinctive
director's invariably outré productions.
This liaison has brought, one might say, mixed results. On the positive
side, one cannot praise too highly her radiant performance as the sympathetic
ape scientist in Burton's Planet of the Apes, conveying a passionate
commitment to her character through all of that makeup in a manner matched only
by fellow actor Tim Roth. (Indeed, they are the only two reasons to regret that
this otherwise deeply flawed film never engendered a sequel). On the other
hand, confronting the challenge of portraying the homicidal Mrs. Lovett in an
adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of
Fleet Street, the hapless Ms. Carter didn't have a clue. When given smaller
roles in Burton's films, she tended to fall between these extremes, neither
enhancing nor diminishing the quality of the productions, though she was better
than usual as the mother in the misguided Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
and a bit worse than usual as the Red Queen in the annoying Alice in
Wonderland. When her paramour was not in need of her services, Carter also
did some weird films for other directors, playing an evil witch in four Harry
Potter films and a scientist in the fourth, and worst, Terminator
film.
Still, while these were the roles that were attracting attention,
Carter was also maintaining the skills that had made her famous in some less
prominent films set in the drawing rooms and country estates that were her
original stomping grounds, and observing her performance as Queen Elizabeth in The
King's Speech (2010), she conveyed the relaxed aura of someone finally
returning to her comfort zone. To be sure, she may continue to work for Burton
in calamities like Dark Shadows, yet one suspects that she will now be
seeking out more roles in films like Great Expectations (2012) and Les
Misérables (2012), as she pursues that elusive Academy Award and someday,
perhaps, a lifetime achievement award to be accompanied by a series of clips
that, unless carefully edited, will display talents of a quite surprising
variety.
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