The Guardian

Hollywood

Helena Bonham Carter fancies a drink. So she orders a double espresso. And a glass of fizzy water. And an apple smoothie. She looks rather worried when I order just a coffee. “Is that all you want?” she asks gently. Multiple drinking, she explains, is the way to a balanced diet. She admits her theory is not based on pure science.

We are in the cafe just down the road from her north London home. She says she’s got something to show me, and produces a freaky cardboard cutout of a little woman with a huge, hydro­encephalised head. “I’ve brought myself. It’s me... in Alice.” Alice In Wonderland is the latest movie she has made with her partner, director Tim Burton. This is their sixth collaboration, and possibly the grandest. It’s classic Burton territory — a fairytale world where adulthood is never quite attained, and innocence trails a ghoulish stench. Bonham Carter is playing nasty — a cross between the Red Queen and the Queen of Hearts.

Bonham Carter has not yet seen the film. No one has. It’s a closely guarded secret. But then, you won’t get far asking her about any film she’s been in. In recent years, she has boycotted them. She can’t stand watching herself. Nor can Johnny Depp, Burton’s prettier alter ego, who plays the Mad Hatter in Alice. “Johnny doesn’t watch anything he’s in. That’s slightly comforting.” You don’t look your best in Alice, I say. “No, I can never rely on Tim to make me pretty.”

Bonham Carter’s career divides neatly into two ages — pre-Burton and Burton. She seems so different from the 19-year-old who emerged in A Room With A View, and went on to be a poster girl for EM Forster, English roses and the corset industry. The past decade has been Burton time — increasingly wacky characters in increasingly wacky movies, from Big Fish to Charlie And The Chocolate Factory. In Sweeney Todd, she is wonderful as Mrs Lovett, the most adorable serial-killer sidekick in movie history.

“Ageing has helped hugely,” she says. “There’s no question I’m a better actor, and you leave behind a certain typecasting. I was like the corset bimbo.” In those early films she came across like an incredibly posh, terribly British Nastassja Kinski. The irony is that she is the ultimate hybrid — as well as the Englishness, she is also part Spanish, French, Austrian, Czech and Russian. Her childhood looks privileged from a distance, but the reality was somewhat different.

Her mother had a breakdown when Helena was five and didn’t recover for three years.  Then, when she was 13, her father, a successful banker, suffered a stroke that left him severely disabled. As a little girl, Bonham Carter was old beyond her years. Just after her father’s stroke, she found herself an agent. “I just went and got an agent because I thought I can create my own world — you can’t right your own life, but you can escape to a world where you can have control.” It’s strange she chose acting, she says, “because I was intensely shy.” 

She made her professional debut at 16, in a TV commercial. Three years later, she was a film star. But she felt a fraud. She was acting alongside the likes of Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, she’d had no training and she was waiting to be exposed. “I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I felt I was totally bluffing it. Now I’m much easier with it because I’m fundamentally happy.” She made films, then she’d return home, refusing to make the leap into adulthood. “I was married to my parents.”

In the late 1990s she starred in Fight Club, a film that changed the public’s perception of her. Suddenly, the English rose was a disturbed American, dressed in black, blowing louche smoke rings, playing dangerous games with bad boys Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. She took the part in Fight Club just after her only Oscar nomination, for The Wings Of The Dove. “

When she was 30, she finally felt ready to move out of her parents’ home. She stayed in north London, moving a few miles away to Hampstead. She’d had plenty of boyfriends, but had never lived with anybody. “I remember I did think, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if Mr Right moved in next door?’”

The Burton effect
Eventually, he did. During the filming of Planet Of The Apes, the first time she worked with Burton, Bonham Carter barely talked to him. The only thing she remembers him saying to her is that he knew he wanted her as one of his apes, and that he had once lived in Hampstead and it was the only place in the world he’d felt at home. After the film was finished, when she was 35, they began a relationship and he bought the house next door. Actually, the two houses next door. They now have two children. Burton still lives next door.

Once she got together with Burton, Bonham Carter’s image was transformed. They were often photographed together in black, their complexions equally pale, hair equally scruffy. She’d be snapped pushing the kids up the hill looking as if she’d just stepped out of bed. “I’m often criticised for what I wear. That’s my main label in the press now: disastrous dresser!” I think she half likes it — it’s an escape from the pretty prettiness of her youth. “Well, no, sometimes it’s really offensive, but it’s kind of affectionate now. We’re like the bonkers couple.”

People tend to assume the couple’s world is equally divorced from reality. I say a friend told me to ask if they were the wackiest parents in the playground. She cackles, likes the idea, but says I might be disappointed. “I once went to a really brilliant intuitive astrologer. I like all that stuff and the first thing she said was, by God, he’s an efficient man. I thought, how interesting, because that’s the last thing people would say about Tim, but he is. He’s someone who’s very creative and has a mad exterior, but he is fundamentally very sane and practical. I don’t think we’re crazy at all, to be honest.”
As for the domestic arrangements, they are just practical. He bought the houses next door because hers was too small for them to live in, and both need their own space. Do she and Burton see each other much at home? “He always visits, which is really touching. He’s always coming over.” Does he have a key to her house? “No, the houses are joined. We have a throughway. Journalists think there’s an underground tunnel, gothic. It’s actually quite above ground, lots of light.”

She thinks she has changed since being with Burton. “He’s made me more aware. He thinks I overact all the time. He’s got a thing about me having a very mobile face. Tim has often said I’ve got hyperactive eyebrows — he calls them the dancing caterpillars. He’s all for minimal expression. He likes to simplify things, I complicate them.”

Has she changed him? “People who know him say I have, and I feel really flattered. Made him talk more. He didn’t really talk before. Every sentence was unfinished. I used to say he was a home for abandoned sentences. Now he actually finishes them.”

The producer of Alice, Richard D Zanuck, said the film was “for little people and people who read it when they were little 50 years ago.” This holds true for much of the work Burton and Bonham Carter have done together. And yet, she says, at 43 she feels adult for the first time in her life.