The Return of the Classic Films Obituary Thread [View all]

We've missed a lot of farewells, but it's never too late to pay tribute.

The thread starts with film, television, and stage actress Helen McCrory, 52.

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2021/apr/18/helen-mccrory-obituary

Helen McCrory, who has died of cancer aged 52, was already established among the leading stage actors of her generation when she became known as Cherie Blair in Stephen Frears’s movie The Queen (2006), starring Helen Mirren, and with Michael Sheen as Tony; and as the witch Narcissa Malfoy, mother of Draco, in the last three Harry Potter films.

Her brisk and slinky Cherie Blair was one in a line of suited authority figures and lawyers played by McCrory, culminating in an acidulous, brutally frank but deluded Tory prime minister in David Hare’s television drama Roadkill (2020), refusing to give a “big job” to Hugh Laurie’s shameless MP. In comparison, Narcissa was a “turn,” a Gothic hoot, for all her verve and suffocating evil.

But it was her imperious matriarch Aunt Polly in Peaky Blinders (five series, 2013-19), ruling the roost in the inter-war criminal Shelby family in Birmingham, and keeping tabs on the ill-gotten gains, that suggested her roots in complex dramatic performance on the stage.


The retrospective continues at the Guardian website.