Helena Bonham Carter
Born: 26 May 1966
Where: London, UK
The actress has broken out of typecasting in prim Edwardian period pieces to starring roles in movies ranging from Fight Club to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
The great-grandaughter of Prime Minister HH Asquith and a Life Peeress in her own right, she had an unstable childhood when her mother suffered a nervous breakdown when she was five.
At sixteen, she went to Westminster School but tragedy struck when her merchant banker father was paralysed from the neck down after going into hospital for a routine ear operation.
As a teenager she won used the proceeds of a writing competition prize on an advert in a casting guide and was turned down by Cambridge University who feared she would quit college to act.
With no experience as an actress, theatre director Trevor Nunn spotted her in Tatler and cast the 17-year-old as the doomed Tudor monarch in the film Lady Jane.
Her big break came two years later in 1986 when she played Lucy Honeychurch, the ingenue heroine of A Room with a View, the Merchant Ivory adaptation of EM Forster's novel.
She further solidified her stereotyping as a 'period player' with her mad Ophelia, to Mel Gibson's Hamlet, and as the impulsive younger sister of Emma Thompson in Merchant-Ivory's meticulous rendering of Howards End.
She also had a turn as the delicate love interest of scientist Kenneth Branagh - who would become her real-life lover - in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
Breaking free from her usual fare, Bonham Carter delivered a fine portrayal of a drug addict engaged to Don Johnson's detective in Miami Vice.
As Woody Allen's unhappy spouse contemplating an affair, in Might Aphrodite, she seemed to be eerily channelling Mia Farrow, especially in her vocal cadences.
Returning to bread-and-butter roles in period garb, Trevor Nunn tapped her for Olivia in his filming of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.
For personal reasons, she turned down the role of Bess in Lars von Trier's Breaking The Waves and had to watch Emily Watson receive critical bouquets and accolades.
In 1997, it was her turn - in what many felt was the best role of her career to date - when she was Oscar-nominated as the the manipulative Kate Croy in The Wings Of The Dove.
After a turn as a dowdy spinster in Keep The Aspidistra Flying, she and Branagh re-teamed for the modern romance Theory Of Flight.
In 1999, she dropped her petticoats again to play a neurotic who attends various self-help groups just for a kick, opposite Edward Norton and Brad Pitt in Fight Club.
Next up was heavily made-up ape Ari in Tim Burton's Planet Of The Apes, and an alluring siren in Novocaine, opposite Steve Martin.
In 2002, she played Dinah in the romantic drama The Heart of Me, opposite Paul Bettany; Ruby in Till Human Voices Wake Us;and a creepy witch in Big Fish.
After a five-year relationship with Branagh, Bonham Carter got together with fellow eccentric Tim Burton thanks to Planet Of The Apes and gave birth to their first child, a boy Billy, in 2003.
In 2005, she appeared in Burton's version of Charlie And The Chocolate Factory alongside Johnny Depp and also provided the voice of the aristocratic Lady Tottington in Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Werewolf.
The following year she played an overbearing mother in the engaging Jewish coming-of-age comedy Sixty Six.
Recent work includes the re-teaming with Depp and husband Tim Burton to play Mrs Lovett in the director's acclaimed adapation of Sweeney Todd - The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
