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NAPA VALLEY -- England's quintessential rose has her thorns.
Helena Bonham Carter gets most prickly when people suggest she is a 19th-century woman trapped in 1997.
Considering her work in such period dramas as Lady Jane, Twelfth Night, A Room With a View, Where Angels Fear to Tread, Hamlet, Frankenstein and Howard's End, it seems like a valid assumption.
In her newest film, The Wings of the Dove, Bonham Carter is back in corsets. It opens Friday.
In real life, the English actress is punkish from her spiked hair and oversized cardigans to her chunky ankle-sized boots and black socks.
"I deeply resent that I get offered so many of these demure roles. They're so not me," insist Bonham Carter.
"I also hate that casting people and directors consider me petite. It sounds so patronizing. I'm not frail. I'm beefy and strong. I was a gymnast in school."
Still, when Bonham Carter puts an Edwardian wig over her own short hair, squeezes into a corset and steps into flowing dresses, she becomes the romantic ideal of femininity.
"The hair girl is the romantic, not me. I'm far more practical. I'm far more realistic.
"I drink booze, I smoke and I'm hooked on caffeine. No wonder it takes them three hours to get me ready to be a period woman."
In The Wings of the Dove, Bonham Carter plays Kate Croy, an English girl who talks her lover (Linus Roach) into wooing a dying American heiress (Alison Elliott).
The Wings of the Dove is based on a Henry James novel.
"I saw Kate as a wonderful Bette Davis kind of woman who could be simultaneously alluring, competitive, powerful, sensuous and manipulative.
"I loved the idea that Kate was alluring and dangerous at the same time."
Two years ago, the British press tried to paint Bonham Carter with exactly the same broad strokes. They accused her of breaking up the marriage of Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson.
Bonham Carter met Branagh when he directed and starred opposite her in Frankenstein.
"I was never the other woman and I never pursued Kenneth. We began our relationship after he and Emma had ended their marriage."
Bonham Carter is relieved that the British press no longer harasses them.
"It was difficult for a long while. They consider us boring now and that's a relief."
She and Branagh just completed an independent film called Theory of Flight, in which she plays a severely handicapped woman. Branagh is a petty criminal who is assigned to be her caregiver in lieu of going to prison.
"Kenneth and I debated whether it would be a help or a hindrance since we were now a real-life couple.
"The part required me to be very vulnerable, so I wanted Kenneth there. It's easier to be vulnerable on camera when you've been vulnerable in real life with that person."
The role stirred up deep emotions in Bonham Carter, whose father is now severely handicapped as a result of a brain operation and a stroke.
"It was a very hard road for me to go down.
"Emotions came out that I had effectively repressed for a long while. My father became ill starting in 1979."
The Wings of the Dove called for Bonham Carter's first nude scene and it was some thing she didn't approach lightly.
"I think it's more the thought of being so exposed rather than actually being exposed that is so hard to deal with. I had to convince myself that I wasn't being exploited. I had to be convinced that the scene was not meant to be erotic."
When the day finally arrived she was initially filled with anxiety, but then she got the giggles.
"Now that it's all over and up there on the screen, the only thing I resent is that Linus wasn't at all exposed. The cameras were very discrete with him because he's a man.
"It's crazy, illogical and annoying. I know if I'm ever asked to do another nude scene I'll demand that the man and I be treated exactly the same."
Bonham Carter recently turned 31.
She admits she's been thinking about marriage and children.
"That particular clock is definitely ticking. There is a time scale to our lives and I have to decide what I'm going to do with mine."
Bonham Carter began acting in Lady Jane when she was 18, but she says her love of theatrics began 10 years earlier.
"A New Zealand actress named Lisa Harrow came to London to study with the Royal Shakespeare Company. She stayed at our home.
"She became my idol. I was determined to be an actress just like her. I had spent most of my youth pretending to be someone else, so acting seemed like the most logical progression."
HELENA BONHAM CARTER FILM HISTORY
It is the complexity of the characterizations that actress Helena Bonham Carter says draws her to film roles in literary adaptations. Bonham Carter happily continues to appear in what have come to be known as Merchant Ivory pictures so don't look for her to be appearing as Phoebe's ditsy sidekick on Friends any time soon.
Upcoming for Bonham Carter are Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Theory of Flight and The Wings of Dove, which opens Friday.