Why Bonham Carter went to the dark side

Helena Bonham Carter doesn’t mind being odd, says Simon Hattenstone in the London Guardian. When the public first discovered her in A Room With a View and Howards End, she was a posh and refined English beauty. That changed when Bonham Carter started dating the eccentric director Tim Burton. Very soon, she began looking just like him—dressed in black, scruffy, with her hair mussed, and looking strangely pale. “That’s my main label in the press now: disastrous dresser! Sometimes it’s really offensive, but it’s kind of affectionate now. We’re like the ‘bonkers couple.’” It’s true, she concedes, that Burton has a dark fascination with death. “It’s not that he likes it, but he’s considered it in his work. He’s someone who’s very creative and has a mad exterior, but he is fundamentally very sane and practical.” Their living arrangements are similarly bonkers: Bonham Carter lives in one home with the couple’s two children, while Burton lives in the house next door. “There’s a snoring issue,” she explains. “And he’s an insomniac, so he needs to watch television to go to sleep. I need silence. [But] he always visits, which is touching. I don’t think we’re crazy at all, to be honest.”

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