AN
APPRAISAL
How Helen McCrory Shone, Even in a Haze of Mystery
She was unforgettable onstage playing seemingly serene
women who rippled with restlessness.
Ben
Brantley
By Ben
Brantley
April 17,
2021
Selfishly,
my first feelings on hearing that the uncanny British actress Helen McCrory had
died at 52 were of personal betrayal. We were supposed to have shared a long
and fruitful future together, she and I. There’d be me on one side of the
footlights and her on the other, as she unpacked the secrets of the human heart
with a grace and ruthlessness shared by only a few theater performers in each
generation.
I never met
her, but I knew her — or rather I knew the women she embodied with an intimacy
that sometimes seemed like a cruel violation of privacy. When London’s theaters
reawakened from their pandemic lockdown, she was supposed to be waiting for me
with yet another complete embodiment of a self-surprising life.
Ms. McCrory
had become world famous for dark and exotic roles onscreen, as the fiercely
patrician witch Narcissa Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies and the terrifying
criminal matriarch Polly Gray in the BBC series “Peaky Blinders.” But for me,
she was, above all, a bright creature of the stage and in herself a reason to
make a theater trip to London.
More often
than not, she’d be there, portraying women of wit and passion, whose commanding
serenity rippled with hints of upheavals to come, masterly performances in
masterworks by Shakespeare, Chekhov, Pinter, Ibsen, Rattigan and Euripides.
Sometimes, she’d take you to places you thought you never wanted to go, to
depths where poise was shattered and pride scraped raw.
How
grateful, though, I felt at the end of these performances, even after a
pitch-bleak “Medea,” at the National Theater in 2014, which she turned into an
uncompromising study in the festering nightmare of clinical depression.
Granted, I often felt sucker-punched, too, maybe because I hadn’t expected such
an ostensibly self-contained person to unravel so completely and convincingly.
Then again, that was part of the thrill of watching her.
Most of Ms.
McCrory’s fans felt sucker-punched by her death, I imagine. Aside from her
family — who include her husband, the actor Damian Lewis, and their two
children — few people even knew she had cancer. The announcement of her death
was a stealth attack, like that of Nora Ephron (in 2012), who had also managed
to keep her final illness a secret.
I have
great admiration for public figures who are able to take private control of
their last days. Still, when I saw on Twitter that Ms. McCrory had died, I
yelled “No!,” with a reiterated obscenity, and began angrily pacing the room.
Damn it,
Ms. McCrory had within her so many more complex, realer-than-life portraits to
give us. Imagine what we would have lost if Judi Dench, Maggie Smith or Helen
Mirren had died in her early 50s.
Like Ms.
Mirren, Ms. McCrory, at first glance, exuded a seductive air of mystery. Even
in her youth, she had a sphinx’s smile, a husky alto and an often amused,
slightly weary gaze, as if she had already seen more than you ever would.
In the
early 21st century, I saw her as the languorous, restless Yelena in Chekhov’s
“Uncle Vanya,” a role she was born for (in repertory with a lust-delighted
Olivia in “Twelfth Night,” directed by Sam Mendes); as a defiantly sensual
Rosalind in “As You Like It” on the West End; and (again perfectly cast) as the
enigmatic friend who comes to visit in Harold Pinter’s “Old Times” at the
Donmar Warehouse.
In those
productions, she brought to mind the erotic worldliness of Jeanne Moreau. It
was her default persona in those days, and one she could have coasted on for
the rest of her career. She brimmed with humor and intelligence, and I could
imagine her, in another era, as a muse for the likes of Noël Coward.
But Ms.
McCrory wanted to dig deeper. And within less than a decade, between 2008 and
2016, she delivered greatness in three full-impact performances that cut to the
marrow of ruined and ruinous lives. First came her electrically divided Rebecca
West in Ibsen’s “Rosmersholm,” a freethinking “new woman” torn apart by the
shackling conventions of a society she could never comfortably inhabit. Then
there was her heart-stopping Hester Collyer, an upper-middle-class woman
destroyed by sexual reawakening, in Terence Rattigan’s “The Deep Blue Sea.”
In between,
she dared to be a Medea who had hit bottom before the play even started. In
Carrie Cracknell’s unblinkingly harsh production, Ms. McCrory played
Euripides’s wronged sorceress as a despair-sodden woman who believed she would
never, ever feel better. It was the horrible, dead-end logic of depression that
drove this Medea.
“Nothing
can come between this woman and her misery,” observed the household nanny
(played by a young Michaela Coel). But it was Ms. McCrory’s gift to lead us
into that illuminating space between a character and her most extreme emotions,
and to make us grasp where those feelings come from and how they have taken
possession of her.
Ben
Brantley, the former co-chief theater critic, wrote more than 2,500 reviews for
The New York Times over 27 years beginning in 1993, filing regularly from
London as well as New York. He retired from regular reviewing in 2020.
.webp)
.jpeg)
No comments:
Post a Comment