Coincidentally, her decision to leave the safety of the nest comes just as her relationship with Branagh has gone public. When Bonham Carter mentions that she has just spent the weekend with her "boyfriend," she adds self-consciously, "It's official now," but says that their privacy is something Branagh is "very protective of." She's been reportedly seeing the Oscar-nominated actor, 37, since 1994, when he cast her in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, although Branagh and Emma Thompson didn't announce their separation until the following year. The duo has been hounded by the tabs since 1996, when paparazzi caught them kissing in a park and they were accused of staging the moment for public consumption. Asked about the chronicling of their courtship, she says, "You do miss the freedom of being anonymous."
Wings--and any accompanying Oscar glory--may shatter that anonymity forever. Though the trappings of the movie, the flowing dresses and tresses and scenes of Edwardian London and idyllic Venice, are familiar ones, Bonham Carter plays Kate Croy as a complicated, sensual woman in director Iain Softley's insistently modern adaptation. The primary concern, for both actress and director, was that the role feel different from those period dramas that had come before, including her turns in A Room With a View and Howards End. "I was quite frightened," Bonham Carter says, laughing, "because I thought, Christ, if I'm not careful, this was going to be yet another nail in my old tight-corset coffin."
Instead of being a death sentence, the role brought Bonham Carter's acting to life. She's mesmerizing as Kate, who throws together her lover, Merton Densher (Linus Roache), with fatally ill American heiress Millie Theale (Alison Elliott), hoping that Millie will leave Merton her money. Not only was she playing someone who was essentially, she says, "a baddie," she also had to get naked. "We went through [the nude scene] line by line, move by move, moment by moment," says Softley, and Bonham Carter even storyboarded it herself. "I've never done a nude and a bonk in one go," she says. "I just shut my eyes and got on with it." The result is Bonham Carter as she has never been seen before on film: naked, vulnerable, and unabashedly sexual.
Though she worked nonstop after Wings of the What's-it, including playing a woman with a motor-neuron disease in a project in which she costars with Branagh, The Theory of Flight, she's now concentrating on finishing the renovations in her home. And like your basic girl's girl, she's starting to wonder, she admits, "Is this it?" She sometimes dreams of taking a sabbatical to finish her education, but the notion is "fictitious," she says, "because I'm seeking a sense of completion--to have done, rather than the doing." Might a little gold statuette offer some completion? "It's funny, when you get a bad review, it has such impact--instant depression," says Bonham Carter. "You'd think the opposite would happen when you got an award, but you just feel in a daze. It's an English thing: You mustn't let it go to your head." It's the polite and proper response, but just as quickly as she says it, Bonham Carter pauses, loosens the bonds of corseted propriety, and fesses up: "Oh, heck, I like 'best.' It's a fictitious idea, but it's really nice for a day."
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