Helena Bonham Carter

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Image:Marla Singer and Jack.jpg.jpg Helena Bonham Carter (born on May 26, 1966) is an English actress.

1 Biography
2 Selected filmography
3 External links

Biography

Early life

Bonham Carter was born in Golders Green, in London. Her father was Raymond Bonham Carter, who came from a famous British political family; she is the great-granddaughter of the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Herbert Henry Asquith, and members of her family are Life Peers. Her mother, Elena, was a psychotherapist. Her maternal grandfather was a Spanish ambassador and a Catholic; her maternal grandmother came from a rich Austrian-based Jewish family, and had converted to Catholicism upon marrying her ambassador husband (despite the conversion, both Helena and her mother are considered Jewish under Jewish religious law). She is a great-niece of the late Baroness Liliane de Rothschild (1916–2003) of the Rothschild banking family, as her maternal grandmother's sister married a member of the Rothschild family.

She has two brothers, Edward and Thomas. Her father became ill when she was 10 and suffered a stroke during an operation to remove a benign brain tumor; he was subsequently confined to a wheelchair. Bonham Carter was educated at the South Hampstead High School and Westminster School.

In 1979, she entered and won a national writing contest, and used the money won to pay for her entry into the actor's directory, "Spotlight". She made her professional acting debut at the age of 16, in a television commercial.

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Career

Bonham Carter's launch into the world of acting came when she won a writing competition in her early teens while at South Hampstead High School and decided to spend the prize money on employing a theatrical agent. It is a matter of interpretation what her film debut was. Strictly speaking, her first role was in a small part in an obscure film A Pattern of Roses, but this is little remembered. Her first starring role to be filmed was in Lady Jane opposite Patrick Stewart, which was eventually released to somewhat mixed reviews. Her breakthrough was A Room with a View, which was filmed later but released earlier. These films led to her being typecast as a "corset queen", an "English rose" in costume dramas, but eventually she expanded her range.

Initially renowned for her portrayal of pre- and early 20th century characters, particularly in Merchant Ivory films, Bonham Carter now has a high profile for more recent films such as Fight Club, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Tim Burton's Corpse Bride and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

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Private life

She has been reluctant to discuss her private life, but some facts are generally known. She was in a relationship with Kenneth Branagh from 1994 to the summer of 1999, which only began after Branagh was already in the process of separating from his wife Emma Thompson. Bonham Carter and Branagh appeared in a number of films together, but split up. After this, she was in a brief relationship with Steve Martin. In October 2001, she began a relationship with director Tim Burton, whom she met while filming Planet of the Apes and cost him his long-standing engagement to muse Lisa Marie. Helena now appears in all of Burton's subsequent work. They have one son, Billy-Ray Burton, born on October 4, 2003.

At one point she had to take out a court order against a man who had been stalking her, banning him from entering a large area around her home.

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