Profile: Helena Bonham Carter

It is how she is depicted as Wonderland's enraged Red Queen in the 3D movie directed by her partner Tim Burton, an unflattering look that prompted her to remark: "I can't rely on Tim to make me pretty".

Yet it is an interesting irony that a woman who spent much of her early acting career embodying a certain type of English prettiness has ended up embracing the darker side of ugliness. As she told a journalist recently: "That English rose has definitely wilted."

Bonham Carter's route from red rose to Red Queen is a curious one. She is often trumpeted as an upper-class aristocrat, with relations including Liliane de Rothschild, James Bond author Ian Fleming, Florence Nightingale and former prime minister Herbert Asquith, who was her great grandfather. Yet her upbringing in London's Golders Green was only modestly privileged.

She describes herself as an "under-confident" child who was "a bit of a swot" with a fertile imagination. Her early childhood was peppered by family tragedy. When she was five her mother Elena had a serious nervous breakdown, from which it took her three years to recover. Further trauma struck the family when she was 13 and her father Raymond suffered, at the age of 50, a devastating stroke that left him paralysed and in a wheelchair. With her two elder brothers away at college, it was up to Helena to help her mother care for her father. Her reaction was to hire herself an acting agent.

"I just went and got an agent because I thought I can create my own world, you can't right your own life but you can escape to a world where you can have control," she once said.

At 18, she had to make the choice between Cambridge and acting, after Trevor Nunn spotted a photograph of her in Tatler and offered her the role of Lady Jane Grey. "I remember my Dad saying, you've got a break, and that's something you can't manufacture – you've got to go with it and see where it takes you."

Where it took her was into a world beset by Edwardian corsetry, as she wafted around the screen in a number of Merchant Ivory productions including the role of Lucy Honeychurch in the big screen adaptation of EM Forster's A Room With A View.

Throughout her twenties her career blossomed, with roles in films such as Howards End – another Forster adaptation, and a turn as Ophelia in a film version of Hamlet. Yet off-screen, she was something of an androgynous little-girl lost. When she was 21 she told an interviewer: "You're less threatening if you're boyish and young and sweet and cute."

It's an attitude she now confesses horrifies her. "When I was young, I believed in being androgynous – you can't flaunt it, you can't use it," she said recently. "And now it's just like, 'Hey, enjoy it!' Now I feel fine about shapes and things. It's nice to have curves. To be a woman."

In 1995 she started dating Kenneth Branagh, who was freshly split from his former wife, and Bonham Carter's friend, Emma Thompson. He cast Bonham Carter in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and was her first serious relationship. Yet despite the confidence boost, she still seemed uncomfortable in her own skin. One journalist, interviewing her in 1997, observed that she would do deliberately unsexy things like wipe her nose on the back of her hand and sit with her toes turned in, as if every inch of her were screaming "don't fancy me! I'm only a little girl!"

Perhaps this was partly because she was still living at home with her parents, and didn't move out until she was 30. "(I was] trying to make it better in some way – I thought, if I remain a child, I will make up for what happened to Dad," she once said.

She and Branagh broke up in 1999, around the time when she started to significantly change acting direction with her role as the off-beat femme fatale in Fight Club, a film that won her a younger, more alternative audience than she was used to. Yet despite her growing professional confidence, there was a time in her early thirties, she says, where she says she "definitely had that feeling of, 'oh my God, I'm never going to meet someone'."

She met Burton in 2001. His opening gambit was "I can really see you in an ape mask". Bonham Carter, who went on to work on his rendition of Planet Of The Apes, was amused. But it was a while before they became a couple.

"When we finally started going out, people were like: 'How come it took so long for you to see it?'" she said. "But I suppose for a long time I didn't look at him in that way. Now it's like: 'Oh, of course it had to be him.'"

They set up home together in Hampstead – a part of London Burton first discovered when filming Sleepy Hollow and the only place where, he confessed to Bonham Carter early on, he had ever felt at home. Their living arrangements are a quirky source of endless fascination: they live in two separate houses, joined by a room with two doors, each with their own kitchens, bedrooms and living rooms.

Bonham Carter has always laughed off the suggestion that there is anything curious about it, or that it points to a flaw in their relationship. "To me it makes complete sense," she says. "If you've got some money and you can afford it, why not have your own space?"

They have two children, Billy and Nell, who live in a third house across the street, and the couple sleep together "sometimes". "There's a snoring issue..." she once said. "I talk, he snores. The other thing is, he's an insomniac, so he needs to watch television to get to sleep. I need silence."

Although she has appeared in every film Burton has made since he met her, both are adamant that there is no favouritism, and that she has to audition like everyone else. Their on-set relationship meanwhile, can be rocky. During the filming of Sweeney Todd they apparently rowed frequently, embarrassing her co-star Johnny Depp, Burton's best friend, who had frequently to pretend to be sharpening his razors in an attempt not to hear.

Now 43, Bonham Carter has become a magnet for words such as "wacky", and "kooky". Yet instead of hiding from them, as she sought to hide from so much when she was younger, she appears now to embrace it, all the way from her bird's nest hair down to her quirky handbags.

As she herself once remarked: "I suppose I'm just a late developer."

Helena Bonham Carter has only received one Oscar nomination, for Wings Of A Dove in 1997, and lost out to Helen Hunt. "For two syllables I thought I was up there," she remarked afterwards.

She wasn't sure about appearing in the movie Fight Club when she first read the movie plot. "To be honest, I didn't completely get the script," she said.

After her mother experienced a nervous breakdown she trained as a psychiatrist, and Bonham Carter now gives her scripts to read, so she can provide a psychological profile of her characters.

Bonham Carter speaks French fluently, and in 1996 appeared in the French language film Portraits Chinois.

She has played three queens: Lady Jane Grey in the title role of the Trevor Nunn film, Anne Boleyn, in an ITV mini-series, and Wonderland's Red Queen.