Best known for her roles as Narcissa Malfoy in the Harry Potter film series and as Aunt Polly in the BBC’s Peaky Blinders, actress Helen McCrory passed away on April 16 at the age of 52 after a long battle with cancer.
As well as being a star of film and TV, Helen McCrory also had a prolific stage career, being nominated for two Olivier Awards and regularly worked at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her final performance was in the BBC drama Roadkill opposite Hugh Laurie.
Sir Richard Eyre, who gave McCrory one of her first significant stage roles in the 1990s in The Importance of Being Earnest, said one of the most upsetting things about her death was that "we will be deprived of major performances that she would have been able to give" and described her as a successor to Dame Judi Dench.
She met her husband actor Damian Lewis during a theatre production of Five Gold Rings in 2003 and they married in 2007, before having two children. During the pandemic, they founded and raised £1 million for Feed NHS, a non-profit campaign for feeding NHS staff with food from high street restaurants. The campaign was initially limited to London, but will now be established across the nation.
In a tribute (paywall) for his wife, Lewis wrote that "She's shown no fear, no bitterness, no self-pity, only armed us with the courage to go on and insisted that no one be sad, because she is happy … I'm staggered by her. She's been a meteor in our life."
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