Helena Bonham Carter is certainly no stranger to fantasy and fairy tale films. Not even counting the films she's done with Tim Burton - including Alice in Wonderland, Big Fish, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - there's still the Harry Potter films, in which she played the evil/insane Bellatrix Lestrange. And now she's getting ready to add yet another title to her long genre record.
Disney has announced that Helena Bonham Carter has officially signed on to play the Fairy Godmother in the upcoming live-action adaptation of Cinderella. Set to be directed by Kenneth Branagh, the film stars Downton Abbey's Lily James as the titular heroine, Cate Blanchett as her evil stepmother, and Game of Thrones' Richard Madden as Prince Charming. The classic story follows a young woman who is horribly mistreated by her stepmother and stepsisters. On the night of the Royal Ball, which she cannot attend due to her terrible family, she is visited by her fairy godmother, who grants her wish, allowing to go to the party. There she meets the prince and sweeps him off his feet, but when the spell ends at the midnight she is forced to flee, sending him on a mission to find her.
Bonham Carter actually lived with Branagh in the mid-to late 1990s and they collaborated on two projects during that time. In 1994 she played Elizabeth in his directed adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and then in 1998 they co-starred in Paul Greengrass' The Theory of Flight. You can get a sampling of their performance together in the movie's trailer below.
While it's been a few months since we've last seen Bonham Carter on the big screen, last seen in Tom Hooper's Oscar winning adaptation of Les Miserables, the drought will be over very soon. At the start of next month she'll be seen alongside another frequent collaborator, Johnny Depp, in Gore Verbinski's The Lone Ranger. She has also completed work on director Jean-Pierre Jeunet's family adventure The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet, a French Canadian film currently in post-production. As for small screen work, she wrapped on the BBC TV movie Burton & Taylor, in which she will play famed actress Elizabeth Taylor alongside Dominic West as her husband Richard Burton. She is also attached to star in David Hare's star-studded upcoming BBC efforts Salting the Battlefield and Turks & Caico. The projects co-star actors including Ralph Fiennes, Bill Nighy, Ewan Bremner, and Judy Davis.
