Photo By Dreamworks

Helena Bonham-Carter is the voice of Lady T (right) in Wallace & Gromit, animator Nick Park's long-awaited stop-motion feature film

When Chicken Run, animator Nick Park's feature film, was a worldwide hit five years ago, British actress Helena Bonham Carter was working hard to overcome her corset reputation from popular period films A Room with a View, Howards End, Twelfth Night and Wings of the Dove.

Timing is everything. It's taken years for Park and co-director Steve Box to make Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, a feature-length movie based on Park's popular plasticine duo Wallace, an English inventor with a wide smile and obsession for cheese, and his trusty dog Gromit, who expresses more with his eyebrows than most people do speaking.

Bonham Carter is part of the Wallace & Gromit team, providing the voice-over for Lady Tottington, a ditzy blueblood and sponsor for the Giant Vegetable Competition in Wallace's hometown.

The synchronicity between Bonham Carter and Park is win-win. He gets a known and respected actress to be part of his film; she gets to play an older woman with large orange hair and horsey laugh. Nobody would confuse Lady T with the period drama princesses of Bonham Carter's past.

"I think he wanted a posh actress, and I have a posh background, although I'm not that posh," Bonham Carter says during an interview at the 2005 Toronto Film Festival. "It was definitely a stretch, but it was nice and flattering. I am not being typecast here. That's the nice thing about animation. You get to play parts you are completely wrong for physically. Maybe they're asking me for my experience as an actress."

Bonham Carter's hair is a gelled tousle atop her head. She wears a long strand of pearls that hang low across her chest and looks like an American flapper with a colorful silky dress. She is living proof that her corset reputation should be jettisoned for good.

Bonham Carter, 38, laughs when recounting her personal timeline regarding Wallace & Gromit. She read for the part, but months passed before Park confirmed that he and his Aardman Animation team created storyboards for her character. When it was time to record her dialogue, Bonham Carter admits to accepting the job out of guilt for the work Park had already done.

Wallace & Gromit is similar to live-action moviemaking with its elaborate sets, sweeping camera movements and rich lighting. But everything is done in miniature, and the cast is made of plasticine. Two to three seconds per day is what Park and his team accomplishes -- it's no wonder the film took so long to complete.

During the lengthy production, Bonham Carter worked on her second stop-motion animation film, Corpse Bride, a project with filmmaker Tim Burton, who is her partner and the father of her son Billy.

"She (Bonham Carter) would come in to record, and we'd ask her all about Corpse Bride," Park says, laughing. "Who ever would have imagined Bonham Carter as the Claymation queen?"

In Corpse Bride, Burton and collaborator Mike Johnson tell the story of 19th-century village geek Victor (Johnny Depp), whose planned marriage to shy Victoria (Emily Watson) is interrupted when he marries a corpse (Bonham Carter) by mistake.

Corpse Bride and Wallace & Gromit have visual flair and plenty of comic gags, but there's also character development and feeling in the stop-motion animation. That's where Bonham Carter comes in.

"There's a lot of freedom with animation," she says. "That's what's quite nice, and there's improvisation. I came up with a laugh for Lady T and it became painful. It was a haw-haw-haw snorting, very hard. I also came up with a laugh for Corpse Bride, but Tim (Burton) cut it."

Bonham Carter admits that Burton asked her to consider pulling out of Wallace & Gromit so as not to be in two stop-motion films back-to-back, but she stayed true to her work with Park. And, perhaps just as importantly, the characters of Lady T and the corpse bride are worlds apart.

The two animated turns can be seen as the payoff for her evolution as a character actress that began with her role as thrill-seeking Marla Singer in David Fincher's Fight Club. A Room with a View made her a star at age 19, but the young woman of that film is now a distant memory.

"I am not bothered about peoples' image of me as long as I get a wide range of parts," she says. "Now I'll never do a part because I want to change my image or anything. I just do a part if I enjoy doing it. I am more of a character actress gagging to get out. But I'd never turn down all those costume parts. They were brilliant, and better parts than you often get in movies. I had a great time doing them -- lovely hair, lovely costumes, but not quite as beautiful as Lady T."

Asked what she thinks of Lady T's large red lips, Bonham Carter laughs: "Bottom of monkey comes to mind, and the eyebrows need a bit of a pluck."

Yet, Lady T is as real as any of her other characters. Park says this lifelike quality stems from the medium of clay.

"As the animator, you have your hands on the characters every single frame of film," he says. "Tweaking them in a small way. There is a directness about it. You are teasing the character out of the clay and the direct contact gives it an extra humanity."

But it's Bonham Carter who gets beneath the clay and brings it extra life. ©