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.
اضافة اعلان
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.
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 McCrory’s fans felt sucker-punched by her death, I
imagine. Aside from her family — who include her husband, 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
McCrory had died, I yelled “No!” with a reiterated obscenity, and began angrily
pacing the room.
Damn it, 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 Mirren, 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 those productions, she brought to mind the 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 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.
In between, she dared to be a Medea who had hit bottom
before the play even started. In Carrie Cracknell’s unblinkingly harsh
production, McCrory played Euripides’ 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
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.
I never failed to experience that flash of revelation
watching McCrory. London is going to seem so much lonelier whenever I return to
it.
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