Helena Bonham Carter Biography:

Helena Bonham Carter was born in London, England on May 26, 1966. She is the younger sister of two brothers, Thomas and Edward. Helena found her calling at the tender age of five when visiting a friend, who as it turned out, was an actress. By thirteen, Bonham Carter was performing in school plays and had won a national poetry contest. It was around that time that illness struck the family without warning when her father, Raymond, suffered a stroke in the aftermath of a brain tumor operation. Although Helena diligently helped her mother in the care of her father, she also continued to pursue her acting career. Three years after the tragedy, Helena landed her first role in the 1983 British TV movie, A Pattern of Roses.

Her dark looks and heart-shaped face made Bonham Carter a perfect choice for her first film lead in Trevor Nunn's film version of the life of the doomed Tudor monarch Lady Jane (1986). Despite her relative youth, she was also able to project the requisite mix of hauteur and innocence required for the role. Her second film, the Merchant-Ivory production of E.M. Forster's A Room With a View (1986), firmly established her as a screen presence. As Lucy Honeychurch, Bonham Carter perfectly essayed a young woman swept up in passion. She further solidified her stereotyping as a "period player" with her roles as the mad Ophelia to Mel Gibson's "Hamlet" (1990); by playing the impulsive younger sister of Emma Thompson in Merchant-Ivory's meticulous rendering of "Howards End" (1992); and with her turn as the delicate love interest of scientist Kenneth Branagh in "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" (1994).

Breaking free from her usual fare, Bonham Carter delivered a fine portrayal of a drug addict engaged to Don Johnson's detective on NBC's Miami Vice in 1987. She won applause as a working-class stripper in the British TV-movie Dancing Queen and was superb as Marina Oswald in the NBC telefilm Fatal Deception: Mrs. Lee Harvey Oswald (both 1993). As Woody Allen's unhappy spouse contemplating an affair in Might Aphrodite (1995), Bonham Carter seemed to be eerily channeling Mia Farrow, especially in her vocal cadences. The role of the foul-mouthed, married coal miner's daughter in the Canadian-made Margaret's Museum (also 1995) earned her fine notices, but the film was little seen.

Returning to the bread-and-butter roles in period garb, Trevor Nunn tapped her for Olivia in his filming of Twelfth Night (1996). In 1997, it was her turn in what many felt was the best role of her career to date. As the manipulative Kate Croy in Iain Softley's The Wings of the Dove, Bonham Carter finely walked a line between desperation and hedonism. Her imaginative and finely calibrated performance earned her a number of year-end critics' awards and spawned talk of an Oscar nomination. After a turn as a dowdy spinster in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, she and Branagh reteamed for the modern romance Theory of Flight (both 1998), in which she essayed a victim of motor neuron disease. And not forsaking period roles, Bonham Carter was the bewitching Morgan Le Fey opposite Sam Neill's Merlin (NBC, 1998).

In 1999, she once again left behind the petticoats and pretty frocks to essay a contemporary neurotic, a woman who attends various self-help groups just for a kick, opposite Edward Norton and Brad Pitt in Fight Club. Bonham Carter easily made Marla a complex yet sexily engaging character and the change of pace made audiences and critics recognize anew her prodigious gifts. For her next high profile role -- that of the sympathetic Ari in the new adaptation of Planet of the Apes (2001), the actress' pretty features were covered with simian makeup. Still, her expressive eyes and plummy voice made her recognizable and she once again offered a fine performance. Later that year, Bonham Carter once again played an alluring siren as a patient who drives her dentist (Steve Martin) into a world of sex, drugs and murder in the thriller Novocaine.

In 2002 she starred in the critically acclaimed TV movie Live From Baghdad with Michael Keaton, about journalists in Iraq during the first Gulf War. Next up for Helena is Big Fish, directed by Tim Burton, co-starring Ewan McGregor, Billy Crudup, and Albert Finney.