Helena Bonham Carter - Early Life

Early Life

Bonham Carter was born in Golders Green, London. Her mother, Elena (née Propper de Callejón), is a psychotherapist. Her father, Raymond Bonham Carter, who came from a prominent British political family, was a merchant banker and served as the alternative British director representing the Bank of England at the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C. during the 1960s.

Bonham Carter has two brothers, Edward and Thomas. She was educated at South Hampstead High School, an independent girls' school in Hampstead, London, and later at Westminster School, a co-educational independent school near the Palace of Westminster. Bonham Carter was denied admission to King's College, Cambridge, not because of her grades and her test scores but because school officials were afraid that she would leave mid-term to pursue her acting career.

When Bonham Carter was five, her mother had a serious nervous breakdown, from which it took her three years to recover. Upon her recovery, her experience in therapy led her to become a psychotherapist herself – Bonham Carter now pays her to read her scripts and deliver her opinion of the characters' psychological motivations. Five years after her mother's recovery, her father was diagnosed with acoustic neuroma. He suffered complications during an operation to remove the tumour which led to a stroke that left him half-paralysed and using a wheelchair. With her two older brothers at college, Bonham Carter was left to help her mother cope. She would later study her father's movements and mannerisms for her role in The Theory of Flight, before his death in January 2004.