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Right: as Miss Havisham, in Great Expectations, in 2012
The sickness that inspires Bonham Carter has taken over.
Helena Bonham Carter got her film recognition playing the period piece A Room With a View, from the novel with the same title by E. M. Forster, and the production of the classy British Merchant and Ivory.
Helena played the role of Lucy Honeychurch, a sweet-looking innocent girl who, "[b]y the end of the novel...is a strong and independent woman."
Lucy is nothing like the odd character that Bonhan Carater becomes, in her "real life" adult self.
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Bonham Carter
I've written about the degradation of film stars, here, where I describe the trajectory of Helen Hunt as a reasonably entertaining actress in the sitcom Mad About You, to a degenerate actress accepting a morbid role in the 2012 film The Sessions.
Bonham Carter's recent role is in Charles Dickens' Great Expectations as Miss Havisham, the woman jilted on her wedding day, and who, dressed in her wedding gown, never leaves her room from that fated day on.
Bonham Carter manages to infuse a deranged personality in what would be a sad, and even tragic tale.
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Here's a what she says at the permiere of her film at the London Film Festival (the video is here):
The interviewer asks her how she gets inspired to play her characters.
Bonham Carter waffles on for a bit, then she says:
"I like sick people and [Miss Havisham] is really, really sick. I mean pathologically barking...So I love any kind of sickness, and that sort of inspires me [ends with a weird laugh, as though she knows she is sick]Bonham Carter is "partnered" in real life with film director Tim Burton, whose last film was an infantile version of Alice in Wonderland, in which Bonham Carter played a bumbling Queen of Hearts. They are unmarried, have two children and live apart. To make a semblance of domesticity, they have adjoining houses with separate bedrooms, living areas, and kitchens.
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Below is Bonham Carter at the British Film Institute London Film Festival in 2012, wearing a Vivienne Westwood dress. It is reminiscent of the cut-out wedding rags that Miss Havisham wore, as this writer describes it:
Bonham-Carter...wore a custom Vivienne Westwood look that could be seen as a modern twist on [Miss Havisham's] classic aged wedding gown: black ombre bridal-style dress with a voluminous tiered skirt...
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Closing Night Gala of Great Expectations' in October 2012
Bonham Carter could have chosen other Miss Havisham inspired dresses which Westwood seems to excel in.
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which she titles "Big Cocotte Wedding Dress"
The designer herself:
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And as Miss Havisham, with her Frankenstein husband, who is twenty-five years younger than her:
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