I freely admit that Helena Bonham Carter is a long way from being my favourite actress but, neverless, I accept that there was a time when she was unfairly pigeon-holed as an actress who appeared in pretty period pieces. Her career, before she broke out of the typecasting, always confused me; she kept getting these ‘English rose’ roles despite, rather than because of, her looks – discoloured teeth, eyebrows that threatened to become a unibrow, and hair that was either a tangled mess or lank and unwashed-looking (the picture at the 1987 Oscars shows all three features).
She herself commented that she could play ‘5,000 drug addicts and still be known as Mrs Corset Queen’. For a while it looked as if she was right despite playing Frankenstein’s bride, Morgan Le Fey, a motor neuron disease sufferer wanting to have sex before she dies, a stripper, an outspoken single mother, a prostitute, and a totally insane heiress. Planet of the Apes was her ‘ultimate attempt to try to put the corset to bed’ – bedding the director certainly worked.
Perhaps, as a legacy of her attempt to break out of the typecasting she seems to have developed a fascination with characters requiring prosthetic makeup and dental prosthetics to achieve a radically different – if not outlandish – appearance:
I love the idea of prosthetics. I had done a bit of prosthetics – in Frankenstein I was a bit of a monster at the end – but I had never done a whole part under a mask. I loved the idea that I could be free of my face and inhabit somebody else’s.
In other sections of the site there are more images of Helena as: the ageing Jenny from Big Fish; the swamp witch from Big Fish including the makeup process; Susan Ivey from Novocaine; Ari from Planet Of The Apes; Karen Knightly from The Revengers’ Comedies in her various disguises; the disfigured Morgan Le Fay from Merlin; Elizabeth the bride from Frankenstein.