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Published: 29 December, 2011
by GERALD ISAAMAN

Walking billboards for the fashion industry, not serious artists: that is what actresses in the modern age have become, according to Helena Bonham-Carter.

The Belsize Park-based actress makes the claim in an interview accompanying an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.

Comparing her life with actresses in the past, when it was considered a disreputable profession, the 45-year-old performer blames the media for making life today more difficult for actresses because of an unholy triumvirate: fashion, celebrity and media culture.

Speaking about the life of the actress Nell Gwyn, who was the lover of Charles II in the late 1600s, she says Gwyn’s profession may have been considered as respectable as prostitution, but at least she wouldn’t have been followed down the street by paparazzi and be so well known as to be recognised everywhere.

“The most salient difference between now and then is how the profession has been transformed by the media and fashion world,” Bonham-Carter says in the interview, published on the gallery’s website.

“The average Joe Bloggs would have no idea what Nell Gwyn  looked like and she would be able to go about her daily life unrecognised.

“I am sure that actors had a greater privacy and had to put up with less, if not any, personal tabloid comment.”

As well as the recognition factor, she is also says actresses have become clothes’ horses for brands with wares to sell.

“The profession has also been hijacked by the fashion industry – the stress on what one looks like and wears is extreme,” she says.

“An award ceremony is more about what dress you are wearing than the film you are in. 

We have become billboards.

“At a recent discussion with some very well-known and successful actresses, they were asked if their experience of the profession had held any surprises and they all said that they had not originally signed up to being fashion models.

“Equally, these days the beauty ideal of thinness and youth put pressures that Nell Gwyn would not have encountered. Paintings suggest that they celebrated the curve, and womanly flesh.”

And the horror that haunted many a Hollywood starlet – growing old – also didn’t effect Gwyn’s generation.

“As for aging, I guess they died too early for it to become a real concern, or at least I would like to think they were more concerned about other more pressing things, like survival, than if they looked old,” she says.

“Also they didn’t have glasses. So I suspect everyone looked fuzzy and soft anyway. I fear we have become right old narcissists with the extra decades of time that scientific development has given us.”

So Bonham-Carter, twice nominated for an Oscar including one for her performance as  King George V1’s wife in The King’s Speech, believes there are more “obstacles and difficulties” for today’s actresses compared to those of the past.

“You have to be a curious blend of ‘mimophant’ – have the sensitivity of a mimosa so you can be vulnerable when acting, and the hide of the elephant to cope with the rejection and critics,” she insists.

A portrait of Bonham-Carter sits alongside paintings and photographs of stars including Dame Helen Mirren, Emma Thompson, Zoë Wanamaker and Dame Harriet Walter – and interview insights into their lives – on show until January 8.

Their exhibition runs in parallel with an exhibition of Britain’s first acknowledged actresses, among them Sarah Siddons (1755-1831), who lived in Capo di Monte, in Upper Terrace, Hampstead, and Nell Gwyn, who spent intimate times with Charles II living in Lauderdale House, Highgate.