  Helena Bonham Carter wields a mean magic wand as the cruel Bellatrix Lestrange in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
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LONDON -- Stately Claridge's hotel seems an appropriate venue to interview Helena Bonham Carter. After all, her family tree is festooned with Brit peers and baronesses and one prime minister, great-granddad H.H. Asquith.
En route to the interview, I'd found myself passing by a large stone edifice called Bonham Carter House. "Yes, that is a relative," she says. "A doctor or something. I really should know this, but there are a lot of us. My grandfather was one of 13."
But really, how many of those nobles and noteworthies could be counted on in a magic wand fight?
Mid-interview, Bonham Carter -- who's playing Harry Potter villain Bellatrix Lestrange in the fifth movie, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix -- is on her feet demonstrating what three weeks of wand-fighting lessons taught her.
"It's a lot like fencing, there's a lot of grace to it. It's half-dance," she says as she adopts her favourite position, "in supra," in which she aims over the head, arm arched like a cobra.
"And then there's 'ada partum,' " she says, switching gears, "which is doing a circle which circumscribes the thing you're aiming at. But you have to be very focused."
She practised extensively at home, to the annoyance of her significant-other Tim Burton (father to their 3-year-old son Billy Ray). "He'd mostly roll his eyes and go, 'Gee-zus!' " she says with a laugh.
There was a time you didn't see Bonham Carter on screen without a corset, her Merchant-Ivory days in mannered films such as Howard's End and A Room With A View. She's quoted in various places saying good riddance to corsetry, but tells us, "those were words placed in my mouth. I loved playing women in corsets, all the best roles for women are corset roles.
"But yeah," she says, anticipating where I'm going. "I have changed course with my roles ... ape (Planet of the Apes) ... corpse (Corpse Bride) ... witch," she says with a laugh. "Yeah, yeah ... definitely!"
It has been by design, she says, though the role of Bellatrix Lestrange was not. Originally assigned to Helen McCrory, the role came open when the actress became pregnant. It wasn't a large role, and it became smaller still when the filmmakers -- intent on keeping as many of J.K. Rowling's characters in play as possible -- cut her climactic magic battle with Harry Potter's godfather Sirius Black (Gary Oldman) down to the barest essentials. Yes, that would be the battle for which she learned all the wand moves. "I practised so much, I ended up with a blister. I hope they put the whole fight in DVD extras after all that."
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