At 13, deeply envious of a classmate in her private London school who was a star on a British sitcom, Helena Bonham Carter picked up the name of the classmate`s agent by eavesdropping on a phone conversation. Then she phoned the agent and launched herself.
Three years later, having followed the agent`s suggestion that she run her photograph in a casting brochure, she landed the plum role of Lucy Honeychurch in ”A Room With A View.” The classmate, meanwhile, went to Cambridge University to study art history. ”She has forgiven me,” Bonham Carter says with a wry smile. ”We`re good friends.”
Many a starlet would have been tempted to run with such quick and easy fame and likely would have wound up in a string of mediocre movies. Bonham Carter, however, perhaps aware that ”Room” was cunningly designed to mask her inexperience (she was the passive pivot around whom the rest of the cast acted), and deeply impressed with the British thespian tradition, set off to pay her dues. For the last three years, she has juggled stage and television roles with classes in voice, movement and technique.
”I felt very pressurized by `Room With A View,` ” she says, ”because I was already in the public eye and people expected things I wasn`t ready to give them.”
In Chicago on a whirlwind tour to promote ”Getting It Right,” an English comedy opening here Friday, Bonham Carter is feeling ”zonked,” as she puts it, from fatigue. In her new film, she`s a flibbertigibbet, a madcap nouveau-riche heiress who runs away from home with her pet parrot. But on this day she could not be more sober. She has just read a guardedly negative review of her performance from a market where the movie already has opened and, although she projects indifference, the experience clearly has not improved her spirits.
”When I made the decision not to go to university or drama school but instead to use experience as my teacher, I knew I had to allow myself the license to fail,” she says with solemn reasonableness. ”You can only succeed if you`re prepared to be bad, if you`re somewhat fearless.”
Bonham Carter looks anything but fearless. With her tiny frame, huge brown eyes and pale skin showing no trace of pink, she could be a runaway teen, the waif of the week. She wears hi-top sneakers and white anklets, black capri pants with the flaps flying, a short mauve pullover and a white linen blouse with the shirttails out, so that when she stretches and yawns her stomach shows. Her brown hair is pulled back into a braid, without, it appears, benefit of a comb.
Though she has swabbed her face with a streaky foundation, in deference to an upcoming photo session, she is otherwise free of make-up and wears no jewelry. Her perfect bow lips look chewed upon. Her hand clutches a cigarette and when occasionally she smiles, it is a sad, weary smile. Her appearance fairly shouts: ”I am a serious person! Pretty? Don`t even think about it.”
Out of the public eye for three years, Bonham Carter shows the barest flicker of wit as she updates her resume. She has no current romance. Yes, she still lives at home in London with her parents, her mother is still a psychotherapist and ”is still half-French, half-Spanish.” (Her mother was the daughter of the Spanish ambassador to the United States and met her father in New York.)
”They are totally different,” she observes of her parents. ”My father`s very English and my mother`s very continental. The first time they met they loathed each other, but a year later, they met again and were married within three months.” She shrugs.
Her father, a former investment banker who has been legally blind and in a wheelchair since an operation for a brain tumor 10 years ago, goes to the theater to hear her perform even though he cannot really see her.
”He can see my form, but I don`t believe he really knows what I look like,” she says. ”He`s very proud and won`t let on that he can`t see. Of course, his mind is excellent.”
She recites these circumstances matter-of-factly, at considerable distance from the pain they must cause. The closeness of her family, she has made clear before, has been a major help to her as she has pursued her career. Equally important, perhaps, has been the larger professional family she has found in the theater. ”I`ve made a lot of friends who are a lot older than me-sometimes two generations. That`s been wonderful. I like that there are no class or age distinctions.” Among her more experienced mentors have been the actor Dirk Bogarde and the actress and writer (”Upstairs, Downstairs”) Eileen Atkins. For ”Getting It Right,” she enjoyed working with John Gielgud, who played her father.
”He was incredibly shy. Modest. Even nervous. He told me: `I`ve seen your work. Congratulations on your success.` And I, without thinking, replied: `Same to you.` And then I thought, my God, what a stupid thing to have said, you know? As if our careers were comparable.” She slaps her forehead in a gesture of amused self-reprimand.
Bonham Carter`s relationship with Mickey Rourke, her co-star in
”Francesco,” an Italian film about St. Francis of Assisi to be released later this year, was civil, but not chummy, she reports. ”I didn`t get to know him at all. He doesn`t seem to notice anything that doesn`t look like a model: tall, beautiful, long legs. Boring as it is, that`s the archetype he gets on with. He`s very inaccessible, really, because of his entourage. So it was very much a professional relationship, which was fine.
”He`s interesting to work with. His talent is very much a filmic talent, very camera-related. He was quite devoted to his Harley-Davidson. It was rather incongruous seeing St. Francis whizzing around the Italian countryside on a Harley between shots.”
Her third film to be released this year is another Italian production,
”La Masquera,” which she describes as an art film about an 18th-Century nobleman with a history of debauchery who falls in love with a traveling actress. She rebuffs him for his past, so he follows her and, using assorted disguises, wins her love. ”It seems to do very well at film festivals,” she says, ”but I don`t know whether it will find a general audience.”
With her delicate, poetic beauty, Bonham Carter tends to be cast in period films. ”Getting It Right” represents a departure from this, but it also means that she had to deal with what has become routine in contemporary women`s roles: on-screen nudity. In her first scene in the film, she appears briefly topless.
”I don`t enjoy doing a nude scene, but I just sort of blank out during filming. What`s bad is watching it later, when the film is completed and there are people watching it with you. You always think there`s something wrong with your body, anyway, and suddenly, up it comes and you say, `Crikes!` ” She cringes.
Beyond this publicity tour, and a week at the Cannes Film Festival, where ”Francesco” is among the competitors, the young actress has no plans besides catching up on routine maintenance. (”When you`re making films, it can be quite difficult to get to the dentist.”) There`s a film she wants to make in Poland, but it is having pre-production problems. She is keenly aware that she has signed on for an erratic existence.
”It`s so changeable. You tend to be at the mercy of the climate of things. At some point I suppose I`ll have to start getting some sort of independent control over my work, such as producing, but first I`ve got to acquire some more knowledge.”
For one who launched herself at 13 with a phone call, that shouldn`t be hard.
