Village's dark star
6:23am Friday 25th January 2008
REG LITTLE reveals Helena Bonham Carter's historic connections with Sutton Courtenay, where she and her film director partner Tim Burton own a house
It is pretty doubtful that Helena Bonham Carter will be signing up for any of the excellent post-natal groups in south Oxfordshire, following the birth of her daughter before Christmas.
It's a pity, though, because, boy, how she could entertain the other young mothers from Sutton Courtenay with accounts of her second pregnancy.
Some of it was spent in the company of movie heart-throb Johnny Depp in serious throat-slashing form - gore and guts flying everywhere, while they sang their hearts out on the most blood-drenched film imaginable.
She could also pass on a few pie-making tips that she was obliged to learn after winning the part of Mrs Nellie Lovett in her partner Tim Burton's new film Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
Although, some might decline to take down her recipe, given her big song in the film is The Worst Pies in London and, of course, Mrs Lovett's speciality is filling her pies with the crazed barber's murdered customers.
But what's a drop or two of fake blood, when you get to sing Sondheim and star with Johnny Depp.
"It's odd. I was being paid by my boyfriend to fall in love with his best friend," she said "A strange situation really."
Strange is a word that has often been applied to Ms Bonham Carter down the years, not least since she set up home with the visionary Hollywood film-maker Tim Burton.
Almost two years ago the pair bought a house in Sutton Courtenay. The move to the 18th-century Mill House was all the more intriguing because of her family connections with both the house and the village itself.
It began when her great-great-grandfather - long-serving Prime Minister Henry Asquith - moved to the village in 1913.
The Wharf, as his house is still known, and the adjoining Walton House, were to serve as Asquith's official country residence in preference to Chequers.
It was there that he signed the declaration that took Britain into the First World War, and Asquith is buried in the churchyard across the road.
The house that Ms Bonham Carter chose as her own country residence, to relax with Burton and their son Billy, now four, is next door to The Wharf, and was restored by her grandmother, Violet, Asquith's only daughter, who died in 1969.
Parish council members and local historians were pleased that a descendant of the great Liberal dynasty forever linked with Sutton Courtenay had moved into the village.
But not as delighted as local schoolchildren, after the 41-year-old actress's scene-stealing performance in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
Forget that Merchant Ivory poster girl nonsense, to anyone aged under 16, Ms Bonham Carter is famous as the twisted Bellatrix Lestrange, the cousin and killer of Sirius Black.
Some village youngsters will also know her for Charley and the Chocolate Factory, another film in which she was directed by Burton and starred with Depp.
Having an Oxfordshire hideaway must have been all the more useful as she faced the challenge of playing Mrs Lovett.
She began the task of turning herself into a singer within weeks of acquiring the Mill House.
"I never thought I could sing, except in the bathroom," she admits. "From June to September of 2006, I sang every single day and I learned pretty much the whole score because I was very, very keen. I went to this amazing teacher called Ian Adams.
"He died recently but he was quite famous for making actors who can't necessarily sing, singers too. Ninety per cent of what he does is to give you confidence and a self-belief that makes you able to open your mouth and produce a sound."
It turns out that she always loved musicals.
But as a young girl, Bonham Carter, being Bonham Carter, did not dream of being Mary Poppins or Maria from The Sound of Music.
No, she fancied herself as Sweeney Todd's obsessively-devoted accomplice, who uses corpses as fillings for her pies.
"I wanted to be Mrs Lovett since I was 13," she laughed. "I went around, apparently, in Mrs Lovett hairdos.
"I've always loved Sondheim. I remember as a teenager sitting in my drawing room looking at the score, going through the lyrics and listening to it."
But nailing the part was not easy, even with her partner as director. She had to audition along with eight other major stars, who were prepared to expose themselves, singing the score with just a piano player.
"Tim thought I might look right for it. He had no idea if I could sing. He said 'go and try to learn. It's always good to have singing lessons'. But I think I had to be righter than right. I did not want to feel, 'my God, I only got the part because I slept with the director'. In any case, Sondheim had the final say and I definitely did not sleep with him."
Winning the role, she says, represented the best day of her professional life. "I was in complete shock and, to be honest, Tim was too."
Both of them wept when she was handed the part.
"I think I've sung that song so many times now, probably nearing 500 times, factoring in when I started singing it, the auditioning and then recording it and making the different choices. You have to do every single thing on the same lyric."
Her character's signature song, The Worst Pies in London, required her not only to sing but to make an entire pie from scratch while doing it. A period pie-maker had to be found to give her pie-making lessons, 18th-century style.
Such commitment came as no surprise to me.
Early in her career, when she was appearing in The Tempest at the Oxford Playhouse, our interview had to be concluded while dodging shoppers along Cornmarket, to avoid her missing the start of a dancing class.
She had given up her chance of going to Cambridge to take up acting. But a photograph of her for Tatler was to result in the film offers - Lady Jane, A Room with a View and Howards End - the roles that established her as the Queen of the Corset.
She made Planet of the Apes seven years ago because she fancied herself in an ape suit. But it led to her meeting with Burton, a director who she had been keen to work with. Sweeney Todd certainly shows why.
Johnny Depp, who also makes his singing debut in the film, was fulsome in his praise for her vocal performance.
"She's very brave," said Depp before a press conference in Knightsbridge. "I mean, without question, that's the toughest part in the movie and she beautifully made it her own. She made Mrs Lovett kind of vulnerable and horrific and funny and sweet."
Burton's friendship with Johnny Depp has resulted in one of the film industry's great partnerships of modern times.
Bonham Carter become pregnant halfway through the film and Depp would take to attentively cleaning his razors, when she and Burton had the occasional disagreement on set.
The couple eventually came up with Indian nicknames for each other. He became Big Chief Little Patience, while she was Little Squaw Running Mouth.
But the couple both appear happy to play up to their reputation as genuine card-carrying showbiz eccentrics - she as the ultimate bohemian beauty with a crazy taste in clothes; he the super-cool master of bringing dark off-beat Gothica to the big screen.
The actress cheerfully revealed that Burton dresses their Christmas tree "with dead babies and slime balls", which, while looking glittery from afar, are gory close up.
At their London home in Hampstead, they famously live in separate sides of a semi-detached house and maintain their own homes - hers like Beatrix Potter, his filled with dead Oompa-Loompas and multi-coloured fibreglass alien lamps.
Assessing the time spent amid the homicidal mayhem, cut-throat razors and cannibalism, she happily joked: "It's actually a portrait of our home life," before adding: "Tim was reared on horror movies. That was his treat every Saturday night. But he's quite mischievous. There's a lot of shlock, which he finds incredibly funny, and a lot of gore in the film, which, again, he finds incredibly funny."
The black humour was certainly to the fore when he was asked about the amount of blood in the film at the press conference.
"It's our own special recipe," he drawled, with the shades and dishevelled black hair giving him something of the appearance of the late 1970s Bob Dylan. "It's very sticky and sweet and burns your eyes."
His girlfriend beside him giggled.
Whether or not Uncle Johnny turns up dressed as a pirate, whatever the quality of Helena's pies, we can be pretty sure her youngsters can look forward to the best children's parties around.