Helena Bonham Carter Home Decor
Mr and Mrs Mad Hatter: The very strange world of Helena Bonham Carter and Tim Burton
Night has fallen in the smartest part of Hampstead, North London, and Helena Bonham Carter and Tim Burton, the odd couple of the movie world, are 'at home' - meaning that they are watching the television in Helena's part of their conjoined artists' studios.
She says it's cosier in her half (it has the property's lone fireplace), which is why they tend to use her kitchen and her TV room during the times when they are together.
To her considerable embarrassment, the 1985 adaptation of E. M. Forster's A Room With A View is being broadcast, and, despite her entreaties that they should not watch, Burton (the director and producer famous not only for his enduring friendship with Johnny Depp, but quirky movies such as Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands) insists on viewing her first ever film performance.
The odd couple: Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter at the world premiere of Alice In Wonderland last night in Leicester Square
She, as usual, hates everything about it: 'How bad I look, how bad my performance is. When I see the work I think: "Oh, no, after all that effort, it's still me." '
Burton, though, finds it hilariously amusing, and points out her 'hyperactive eyebrows', which he likens to dancing caterpillars. 'He thinks I over-act all the time,' she groans. 'He's got a thing about me having a very mobile face.'
Indeed, he spends the entire film in stitches over her shortcomings as she wriggles and cringes.
Not every wife would appreciate such bluntness, but to say that they are 'not your average couple' falls rather short in terms of describing the happily eccentric nature of their partnership. Wags have even nicknamed them Mr and Mrs Mad Hatter.
Tim, 51, fell for Helena, 43, when she was one of the hairier cast members in his remake of Planet Of The Apes (he says he found her 'most attractive' when she was in character as Ari).
Most recently they have worked together on a £164million re-imagining of Alice In Wonderland. She plays the monstrous Red Queen in their sixth collaboration, which had its premiere last night and goes on general release next Friday.
Auditionee: Helena as the Red Queen in Alice In Wonderland
The mutual attraction that blossomed on the set of Planet Of The Apes - despite her prosthetic mouth, lowered brow, ape's hair and false teeth - led to them setting up home, in a most unusual fashion, in Hampstead.
The house used to be two separate dwellings. Now, one belongs to Tim and one to Helena.
Each has its own very distinct decor: hers is girly, vintage and chintzy, while his is a gothic melange of 'skeletons and weird things' and floor lights in neon shades. Each partner has their own television, their own Sky Plus and their own kitchen - although Tim's is barely used.
At night they sleep in their respective dwellings. Not only is Tim an insomniac who likes to pace and watch TV, he says that she talks too much and that he needs some peace and quiet away from her. And anyway, counters Helena, he snores.
And yet there is the occasional blurring of boundaries since Helena has a craft room in Tim's half of the house where she likes to print hearts onto fabric and stitch ribbons onto mob caps.
She has, as followers of her distinctly 'shabby-chic' style will testify, a weakness for fripperies such as broderie anglaise and bobbles.
The two studio houses are joined by a ground level communal room, which is essentially a very grand hallway. Recently, a third home was purchased in the street which is home to the nanny and the couple's two children, Billy Ray, six, and Nell, two.
So how on earth does it work?
'He always visits, which is really touching. He's always coming over,' says Helena of Tim, in a way that suggests she considers this a perfectly normal version of cohabitation.
It's a rather rum state of affairs, but Helena enthuses: 'It really is a great idea. You never have to compromise emotionally or feel invaded.'
It is only when you start to consider how very different they are that you begin to understand why the set-up works so well. After all, Tim - the creative genius behind macabre works such as Sweeney Todd and Sleepy Hollow - prefers to speak as little as possible, while Helena loves nothing more than to chatter away.
'He's much shyer than me,' she has said. 'I used to say that he was a home for abandoned sentences.'
But she believes that his silence goes beyond shyness. In an interview a couple of years ago, given to promote a drama about the mother of autistic boys, she said: 'While making this drama, I realised he has a bit of Asperger's in him.
'You start recognising the signs. We were watching a documentary about autism and he said that was how he felt as a child.
Helena Bonham Carter in Burton's 2001 film Planet Of The Apes
'People with Asperger's Syndrome have application and dedication. You can say something to Tim when he's working and he doesn't hear you. But that quality also makes him a fantastic father. He has an amazing sense of humour and imagination, he sees things other people don't see. Billy is enchanted by him.'
That she loves him for all his quirks is beyond question. A friend of mine who knows Bonham Carter says: 'They are very much in love, and that is obvious if you only spend a few minutes in their company. Without wishing to sound negative, they are the sort of couple who are so in love that the children are secondary to the parents' love story.
'She is very unguarded and genuine, and, in a way, really an innocent, and he just sits there looking at her adoringly and saying not an awful lot.
'They need each other very much. Actually, everyone was rather surprised when she went on to have Nell because we didn't think that, frankly, she was nearly as interested in children as she was in Tim.'
That's not to say for a moment that she doesn't adore her children - she does - or that she is a poor mother - she isn't. But she's not the sort to hover over them every second of the day. And it might be fair to say that being Tim Burton's muse is not an easy job, nor one for the faint-hearted.
Perhaps surprisingly, he makes her audition for roles just like any other actress. She wanted the part of Mrs Lovett in Sweeney Todd so much that she burst into tears of joy when she was told by writer Stephen Sondheim that she had the part - and so did Tim, who had witnessed her hours upon hours of singing training in an effort to be chosen.
In fact, the tension at home was such that Tim told her he could no longer bear to watch the BBC talent show How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria? because they were living the audition process themselves.
On set, he is careful not to demonstrate any favouritism.
'It's inverted favouritism, or maybe just sadism,' she says, and jokes frequently that she will never work with him again.
On the first day on the set of Big Fish, Tim chatted at length with his leading man Ewan McGregor but blanked his own wife. When he later told her it was because he didn't want to be seen 'playing favourites', Helena said: 'I really don't think Ewan would mind you preferring me to him.'
Then, of course, it can swing the other way. On Sweeney Todd, they bickered so much that apparently Depp used to have to pretend to be deeply interested in his prop razors while the two of them barked at each other.
'There are certain stresses that come with working together,' says Helena. 'There's no pretence with us, you see. No "Let's adopt our formal selves".
'Often, I should keep shtum. I think my mouth just opens and I spontaneously say things that occur to me. That can irritate him, and I don't appreciate it that much.
'I've written down certain commandments now that I know I've got to adopt. One of them is I should generally obey, and he should have a bit more patience. One weekend, Tim and I came up with Indian nicknames for each other. I called him Big Chief Little Patience; his name for me was Little Squaw Running Mouth.'
But then, Tim is patently rather hard work - a mostly silent man who doesn't suffer fools gladly. His closest friend is Depp, and the two are known for their long conversations of grunts and in-jokes which are incomprehensible to anyone outside their sanctum.
Tim, who was raised in the Los Angeles suburb of Burbank, is celebrated for his contrarian viewpoint.
Sweeney Todd: Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter starred in Burton's film, but the couple reportedly rowed on set
While his peers enjoyed the seasonless sunshine of California, he loved to stay in, think about death and watch monster movies. It wasn't until he rented in Hampstead while filming Sleepy Hollow that he found, among its historic narrow streets and grime-streaked passageways, a place he could call home.
He has said that Edward Scissorhands - the movie that celebrates the shy, near-mute hero who lives in a lonely hell on the fringes of society - is a portrait of his own childhood.
Surprisingly, perhaps, Burton is also said to be both 'funny and sweet' and a brilliant father to his children, whom he loves to take on imaginative journeys. And the reality is that he has made Helena incredibly happy after a pain-filled childhood of her own.
The great-granddaughter of former Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, she was raised in Golders Green, North London. Her mother had a breakdown when Helena was five and didn't recover for three years. Then, when Helena was only 13, her father, a successful banker, suffered a stroke that left him severely disabled.
She continued to live with her parents until she was 30, 'trying to make it better in some way - I thought, if I remain a child, I will make up for what happened to Dad'.
Her father died soon after she gave birth to Billy Ray, but she was delighted that he hung on long enough to celebrate the arrival of this longed-for grandchild.
More than once, Helena has said that she feels 'very lucky' to have met Burton and had children with him.
'It's really enchanting. It's such a nice life and we have fun. Tim is a great find. I think our sensibilities go well together. He is dynamic and funny, and we are soulmates.
'When we finally started going out, people were like: "How come it took so long for you to see it?" But I suppose for a long time I didn't look at him in that way. Now it's like: "Oh, of course it had to be him." '
But of course it did. Because while the similarities between the two might not be immediately obvious to the outsider, when challenged as to why everyone thought that they looked so right together, Helena rather charmingly remarked: 'I think it's because we don't believe in combs.'
Helena Bonham Carter Home Decor
Source: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1253885/Mr-Mrs-Mad-Hatter-The-strange-world-Helena-Bonham-Carter-Tim-Burton.html