A hearty laugh from beyond the grave

Four films with off-screen partner Tim Burton might seem boringly incestuous, but it works, Helena Bonham Carter tells Michael Dwyer.

When we first met in 1986, Helena Bonham Carter was a 20-year-old ingénue who had completed her first film, Trevor Nunn's Lady Jane, in which she played the ill-fated 16th-century political pawn, Lady Jane Grey. The great-granddaughter of Herbert Asquith, the British prime minister from 1908 to 1916, Bonham Carter spoke in stiffly formal language then, always referring to herself as "one" and saying "yaw" a lot.

On the day she finished shooting Lady Jane, James Ivory offered her the role of Lucy Honeychurch in A Room with a View, beginning what she describes as her "EM Forster phase", which continued with Where Angels Fear to Tread, Howard's End and a fleeting appearance in Maurice. Around the same time she played Ophelia in Hamlet, directed by and starring Mel Gibson, and seemed destined for a career in costume dramas.

"Period movies are my destiny," she said at the time. "I should probably get a few ribs taken out because I'll be in corsets the rest of my life." That seemed even more likely when she became involved with Kenneth Branagh, with whom she spent five years after they met on his 1994 production, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

Ironically, it was on yet another costume drama that she broke the mould, playing the sulky, manipulative Kate Croy in the 1997 Henry James adaptation, The Wings of a Dove. She raised eyebrows when she removed her costume for love scenes, and collected an Oscar nomination for her performance. Her reinvention was completed two years later with her startling portrayal of a chain-smoking, neurotic punk in Fight Club.

The Helena Bonham Carter I met at the Toronto Film Festival had changed radically since our 1986 interview. There wasn't a yaw to be heard, and her former demure demeanour and appearance was replaced by what was closer to a rock chick image, with a loud, hearty laugh.

However, her new movie, Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, is a return to costume pictures - of sorts. An enchanting stop-motion animated musical, it's set in a Victorian era when an arranged marriage is thrown into disarray by an intervention from the after-life. Johnny Depp provides the voice of Victor, a timid young pianist about to marry an even shyer fiancée, Victoria (Emily Watson).

Nervously practising his complicated wedding vows, Victor unwittingly becomes betrothed to the "corpse bride" (Bonham Carter) who rises from the grave and triggers a series of hilarious complications in the here and the hereafter. Still a romantic at heart - even though it stopped beating years ago - the corpse bride describes a view as one that would take her breath away, if she had any. In a later, emotional moment, she cries her eye out.

It's Bonham Carter's fourth film for Burton, her off-screen partner since they first worked together on his thoroughly disappointing Planet of the Apes remake four years ago, when she played a sensitive chimp. She had two roles, unrecognisable in one as an ageing witch, in his next film, Big Fish, followed by the part of Mrs Bucket in the recent Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. "I found Mrs Bucket harder than most parts," she says. "It's easier to have a leading role. A smaller part is harder because you've so little to do that it's more difficult to get into the part. But I feel lucky to get any part in this profession and especially to be in something that I really like and working with a talented director I really trust."

Asked about working with Burton on four films in as many years, she jokes, "I hope it's not just because I sleep with the guy that he gives me all these parts! Actually, it's quite the opposite. Because I sleep with him, he asks me to audition. He gave me Corpse Bride just to read it. I thought it was a beautiful script and really moving. Then he asked me if I would be interested in playing Victoria, the fiancée, and I just felt that I've done the costume drama ingénue to death. I told him I was much more interested in playing the corpse bride, and then he started all these sentences he couldn't finish. He finally got to the point and asked me to audition. Nothing more was said about it until he finally came up very solemnly to me in my house. Well, we have the same house, but it's kind of weird with our own separate spaces. And it was like a sweet marriage proposal the way he said he would be honoured if I would consider playing the role of the corpse bride."

She and Burton live in adjoining, inter-connected houses in north London with their son, Billy, who is two years old this month. "The house is full of paraphernalia from Tim's films, although most of that stuff is in his part of the house. We put in a hallway that connects his crazy part of the house with my elegant and civilised part. I like to have my own space, and Tim needs his space because he works from home when he's preparing a movie. He's always writing down ideas, writing poems and doing all these drawings. And he's always pacing around, which would drive me crazy."

By coincidence, Corpse Bride is the second stop-motion animated movie this month to feature Bonham Carter in the voice cast, the other being Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, in which she plays another titled character, Lady Campanula Tottington, the client with whom Wallace becomes smitten.

"It's an indication of how long animated films take to make that I started working on Corpse Bride when I was pregnant with Billy," she says. "My body was getting bigger and it wasn't appropriate for me to work on a film where I would be on screen. I was feeling starved of acting opportunities, so there were these two stop-motion animated films and I ended up getting parts in both.

"It's just as demanding as being on the screen. You can't just go in there and read the script. You still have to act. Because it was impossible to co-ordinate everyone's schedules, we recorded all our lines on our own. You go into a booth in the recording studio and someone else is there to act opposite you, but it's not the actor who's in those scenes in the film with you. It feels strange at first, but it's very easy to get used to it."

Another attraction of Corpse Bride for her was that it fulfilled her ambition to be in a musical, albeit among the voice cast in this case. "I'm a great admirer of Danny Elfman and his music. I think he has genius, and he's a great teacher, although he's a very modest man. Of course, he's such a good singer in his own right and he used to be in the band, Oingo Boingo. He said I had exactly the same range as Marlene Dietrich!"

The former English rose appears to have settled in very comfortably with the mildly eccentric but richly inventive regular team of Burton and Elfman and their favourite actor, Johnny Depp, who has starred in five Burton pictures. "It's always good to work with someone for the second or third time if you've worked well together before. When you start any film it can take a while to get to know everyone and how they communicate, and to trust them. It's different with Tim, Johnny and Danny - and now me, too - even if it seems boringly incestuous. You're never asked to repeat yourself - everyone wants something different from you every time. You all grow and evolve together, and that feels very safe. But I know Tim would never cast me if it was inappropriate."

Life after death is much more fun than what precedes it, according to the scenario of Corpse Bride. "It's about death," Bonham Carter says," but it's an immensely hopeful film with a beautiful, poetic ending. Tim has a black sense of humour and he's certainly not politically correct, but he's always funny. I asked him should I worry and was it time he had a little therapy, but he said that it's good that he gets it out of his system, and what would be worrying would be if he didn't get it out. Tim is very lucky in that he gets to express himself and the studios pay him a lot of money to do that.

"I like the film's romantic notion that love survives death and that we are going to meet the people that we miss and who have gone before us. I dearly hope that is true. Of course, Tim and I aren't married. Maybe we will someday, though I actually feel married. I know him so well that I usually know exactly what he wants when we're working on a film. The one note he gave me on this film was to keep my voice up and high all the time, because my voice is naturally deeper."

She and Burton are pleased, she says, that Corpse Bride has been given an imprimatur from their son. "Billy watches everything now. He's two and probably doesn't understand much yet, although he is quite sophisticated and probably understands more than we realise he does. He really enjoyed the movie. I think we as adults probably will find it more disturbing as we're nearer to death. That doesn't mean anything to a small child. Motherhood has changed some things for me. I can't just disappear off and spend six months in Australia working on a film like I did in the past. Billy and Tim are the most important people in my life. Now that I'm part of this triumvirate, I try to make the decisions that are best for the family. So I've worked a lot less since I had Billy, and the choices that I make are the ones that fit around the family."

* Tim Burton's Corpse Bride is now on cinema release