#Queen of hearts castle windows

And the sensation of passing through the actual looking glass into a Technicolor world that was hitherto beyond reach was what I felt on the nights of the births of my children. Everything has shrunk, though of course, it is I who have grown up.

Whenever I go back to my childhood home, I feel like Alice– too big for it. He has given us beyond the quotes, the images and metaphors that express so much of our emotional experience: drowning in our own tears, the outsider looking through a keyhole, trapped in a hallway of closed doors, being late, feeling too small, feeling freakishly too big. I was quite right to dress up as Alice at Westminster. He acknowledges the madness – and the irrational, and I’m sorry (I’m no academic), but isn’t it remarkable that he invents, or discovers, the unconscious, about 30 years before Freud did? And is a surrealist more than 50 years before Dalí? He is radical. I think this is the secret to Carroll’s potency. This scene in 'The Crown' was Helena's idea.not many visitors leave without assistance. My home is an example of topsy-turvy living, and a labyrinth with many, many doors. The landing has a shopfront that started life outdoors and is now the entrance to the loo. In the summer, I bring the indoor furniture outside.

#Queen of hearts castle windows

Now I come to think of it, everywhere I look at home, every view has some reference to Alice: frog footman candlesticks, teacup constructions, a teapot lamp, a chessboard teapot, an oversized pocket watch, undersized doors, bunnies, internal windows that look like mirrors, and mirrors that look like windows. Since then, I’ve pillaged and borrowed and stolen all things Alice, and woven and imported them somehow into my life. And the first time you go through it, it is a portal of architectural surprise and wonderment. The actual building of Liddell’s House straddled the doorway and mini-tunnel that leads from the public Dean’s Yard into the private world and school of Little Dean’s Yard. I was fortuitously in a house called Liddell’s, named after the real Alice’s father, who was headmaster of Westminster before moving to Oxford University’s Christ Church College, and next-door to Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll. Helena wears dress by Stella McCartney, cat mask by Piers Atkinson and vintage metal and diamanté earrings by Gillian Horsup, photographed by Tom Craig Louis Theroux told me recently that my look was more dairymaid, and even the formidable deputy headmaster stopped me in the middle of Dean’s Yardhollering, 'BONHAM CARTER?! What have you come as?'(I did wonder what his problem was, as usually girls were reprehended for lack of clothing and revealing too much leg, while I was in full-length Victorian garb. So when I went to Westminster School at 16, I dressed as what I thought was Alice Liddell, not entirely successfully. When I was about 14, I discovered that the real Alice, Carroll’s inspiration for the books, didn’t actually have blue eyes or blonde hair, but brown eyes and brown hair like me. Alice was going to be my friend and companion, and take me down rabbit holes and adventures and help me work out what this confusing thing called life was.

I espied a blue eye and yellow nylon hair: it was her. I remember belly-crawling under the tree on Christmas Eve and stealthily peeling back a corner of the wrapping paper on a promising oblong box. She was huge – practically as big as me – and I had specifically requested her on my Christmas list. I must have been about six when I got an Alice doll. Helena Bonham Carter as the Queen of Hearts in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland Moviestore/Shutterstock // Shutterstock 'Look, it’s got to be you, because I’ve drawn you without intending to.' It was a sketch of an overly large-headed scowling queen. 'I wonder if you would consider playing the Red Queen in my film of Alice in Wonderland?' and before I could respond, he shoved a sketch toward me.

Seated at his desk, he announced quite formally: 'I have something very important to ask you.' At this point, I thought he was going to ask me to marry him.

What was so important that he couldn’t ask me over Cheerios? This was unusual, for at the time, I shared a home with him and our two young children down the other end of the road. Read more odes to Alice in the May issue of Bazaar, out now.īack in 2008, my ex Tim Burton asked me to have a meeting at his office. Here, the actress Helena Bonham Carter writes for us about the impact Alice in Wonderland has had on her life. To celebrate the V&A's 'Curiouser and Curiouser' exhibition, which will open this summer, we invited creators from the worlds of art, literature, entertainment and even gastronomy to share memories of their enduring relationship with Lewis Caroll's groundbreaking novels.