Helena Bonham Carter

Helena Bonham Carter is an English actress whose four-decade career has produced multiple defining English-and-American film roles — particularly her two Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress Academy Award nominations (1998 and 2011) and her ongoing collaborations with director Tim Burton. She was born Helena Bonham Carter on May 26, 1966, in London, into an English aristocratic family. Her father Raymond Bonham Carter was a Bank of England merchant-banker, and her mother Elena Propper de Callejón was a Spanish-Jewish-French-Sephardic-American psychotherapist. Her great-grandfather was H. H. Asquith (the Liberal Party Prime Minister of the United Kingdom across 1908–1916).

Her education at South Hampstead High School (1977–1984; without earning a degree, after she left to begin her professional acting career) launched her early-career path. Her 1985 first feature-film appearance in Trevor Nunn's Lady Jane (in which she played the title character Lady Jane Grey, the nine-day-Queen of England in 1553) launched her early-career English film public profile.

Her subsequent late-1980s and 1990s English Merchant Ivory Productions career produced multiple defining English period-drama films — particularly James Ivory's A Room with a View (1985, in which she played Lucy Honeychurch), James Ivory's Howards End (1992, alongside Anthony Hopkins and Vanessa Redgrave), and her 1997 lead role as Kate Croy in James Ivory's The Wings of the Dove (which earned her the 1998 Best Actress Academy Award nomination).

Her 1999 lead role as Marla Singer in David Fincher's Fight Club (alongside Brad Pitt and Edward Norton) produced her late-1990s American film public profile. Her 2001 first Tim Burton collaboration in Planet of the Apes launched her 2000s and 2010s ongoing collaborations with director Tim Burton — particularly across Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), Corpse Bride (2005), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), Alice in Wonderland (2010, in which she played the Red Queen), and Dark Shadows (2012). Her 2010 supporting role as Queen Elizabeth (the Queen Mother) in Tom Hooper's The King's Speech earned her the 2011 Best Supporting Actress Academy Award nomination. Her parallel role as Bellatrix Lestrange across the Harry Potter film franchise (2007–2011) produced her later international film public profile. She was with Tim Burton from 2001 to 2014, and the couple has two children.

Her name Helena derives from the Greek Helene meaning "torch" or "shining one." Helena has been continuously among the most-popular American girls' names since 1880.