Where to find Helena Bonham Carter on internet TV

She’s played the Queen Mother and the Queen Mother’s youngest daughter; she’s narrated the children’s classic The Gruffalo and starred as one of JK Rowling’s most evil villains; she’s done the low-budget indie thing and also starred in some of the biggest films of the past three decades.

After her acclaimed role as the rebellious but troubled Princess Margaret in Netflix’s third season of The Crown, we thought she deserved a Plum Picks round-up of her very own.

If you thought it was an uncanny coincidence that Helena Bonham Carter played the young Queen Mother in The King’s Speech (filmed in 2010, set in the 1930s) and then in 2019 played the Queen Mother’s youngest daughter Margaret in Netflix’s The Crown, think again. In real life, Helena Bonham Carter’s uncle was once romantically involved with the real-life Princess Margaret – or so she hinted in an interview with Stephen Colbert in November 2019.

To embody the late Countess of Snowden, Bonham Carter consulted a graphologist, an astrologer and a psychic, as well as Margaret’s real-life friends, to get insight into the quirks of her character. She also bought, and wore, Princess Margaret’s perfume.

Released a little over 20 years ago, David Fincher’s psychological thriller introduced us to the beautiful, troubled, irresistible Marla Singer, played by Helena Bonham Carter. She has some of the craziest lines in the whole film, including her tirade about her thrift-store bridesmaid’s dress being like a Christmas tree – or a sex-crime victim. As Rolling Stone wrote, Marla looks like “the waif from hell” – and then went on to say that Helena Bonham Carter had never been as tough or as terrific as she was as Marla.

In this critically acclaimed prequel series of the 1982 Jim Henson dark fantasy movie, which launched on Netflix earlier this year, Helena Bonham Carter plays the Queen of all goblin queens. She overseas every Gelfling in Thra, and has to work closely with the evil Skeksis lords – peace in Thra depends largely on her.

To play the pickpocket in Tom Hooper’s acclaimed blockbuster musical, Helena Bonham Carter underwent intense vocal training. It wasn’t her first singing role – she also sang in the 2007 musical film Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. But, as she told The Daily Mail, because none of the star’s vocals were boosted or enhanced at all in Les Mis, she found her own voice disappointing. “I had lots of vocal training for Les Mis but I didn’t improve as much as I thought I would. I watched it and thought… I was going to be so much better, I thought my voice was going to be so much bigger … but the thing with Les Mis is that it was real so that’s what we sounded like. In Sweeney I had people making me sound better than I am but not for this.”

Voice starring alongside her fellow Harry Potter co-stars John Hurt (who voices the Owl) and Robbie Coltrane (the Gruffalo), Helena Bonham Carter is the voice of the Mother Squirrel, the narrator of the story in this adaptation of the Julia Donaldson classic. She returns in the 2011 sequel The Gruffalo’s Child, also on Showmax.