Helena Bonham Carter

Some Lesser Known Facts About
Helena Bonham Carter

• Does Helena Bonham Carter smoke?: Yes

• Does Helena Bonham Carter drink alcohol?: Yes

• Helena belongs to a political family. H. H. Asquith was Helena’s paternal great-grandfather, who was 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith, and a British statesman of the Liberal Party who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1908 to 1916.

• Helena’s grandfather Sir Maurice Bonham Carter was an English Liberal politician, civil servant, and first-class cricketer.

• Helena is the great-niece of Asquith’s son, Anthony Asquith, legendary English director.

• Her father, Raymond Bonham Carter, was a merchant banker and served as the alternative British director representing the Bank of England at the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C., during the 1960s.

• Helena is the first cousin of the economist Adam Ridley and politician Jane Bonham Carter.

• Her maternal grandfather, Eduardo Propper de Callejón was a Spanish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews from the  Holocaust during World War II, for which he was recognised as Righteous Among the Nations.

• At the time of her schooling, Helena was denied admission to King’s College, Cambridge, not because of her academic performance, but because college officials were afraid that she would leave during the course to pursue her acting career.

• When Helena was five, her mother had faced a serious nervous breakdown, from which it took her three years to recuperate.

• Five years after her mother’s recovery, Helena’s father was diagnosed with acoustic neuroma. He bore complications undergoing an operation to remove a tumour, which resulted in a stroke that left him half-paralysed and using a wheelchair.

• During the filming of ‘Planet of the Apes,’ Helena was romantically hooked up with director Tim Burton, who bought two next door houses to her Hampstead house in London. The two reportedly shared the next door house until their separation in 2014.

• In August 2008, four of her relatives died in a safari bus crash in South Africa, and she was given indefinite leave from filming ‘Terminator Salvation’, returning later to complete filming.

• In early October 2008, Helena reportedly became a patron of the ‘Action Duchenne’, the national charitable foundation established to support parents and sufferers of Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

• In 2009, TIME magazine listed Helena among the “Top 10 British Actresses of All-Time“.

• For her services to drama, Helena was bestowed upon ‘Commander of the Order of the British Empire‘ (CBE) in the 2012 Queen’s New Years Honours List.

• Helena is famous for her unconventional and eccentric sense of fashion. In spite of her often controversial fashion choices, Vanity Fair named her on its 2010 Best-Dressed List.

• Helena is the first female actress to have appeared in two films that grossed over $1 billion; 2010’s “Alice in Wonderland,” and 2011’s “Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Part 2.”