Harry Potter star Helen McCrory was versatile actress

LONDON • Helen McCrory, the accomplished and versatile British stage and screen actress who played Narcissa Malfoy in three Harry Potter films, in addition to earning critical plaudits for her stage work, has died at her home in north London. She was 52.

Her death, from cancer, was announced on social media last Friday by her husband, actor Damian Lewis.

McCrory was a familiar face to London theatre audiences and to British television and film viewers well before she won wider recognition in the Harry Potter movies.

She began her career in theatre in 1990, straight out of drama school, playing Gwendolen in a production of Oscar Wilde's The Importance Of Being Earnest in Harrogate, Yorkshire.

In 1993, director Richard Eyre, who was the head of the National Theatre, cast her in the leading role in his production of Arthur Wing Pinero's comic play Trelawny Of The "Wells", for which she earned glowing reviews.

The next year, she played Nina in Anton Chekhov's The Seagull at the National Theatre, alongside actors Bill Nighy and Judi Dench; and in 1995, she was named "most promising newcomer" in the Shakespeare Globe Awards for her portrayal of Lady Macbeth in the West End.

But as early as 1994, McCrory was also venturing into film and television work.

In 2003, she appeared as Barbara Villiers, mistress of Charles II, in director Joe Wright's four-part series Charles II: The Power And The Passion.

In 2006, she made a cameo appearance as Mrs Cherie Blair, wife of then British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in director Stephen Frears' movie The Queen - a role she reprised in the 2010 film The Special Relationship, written, as was The Queen, by Peter Morgan.

McCrory became known to worldwide audiences through her 2009 role as Narcissa Malfoy, mother of Harry Potter's nemesis, Draco Malfoy, in Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince (2009).

She played the role again in Parts 1 and 2 of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows (2010, 2011), the final films in the series.

She had in fact been slated for a larger role, as Bellatrix Lestrange, in the earlier Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix (2007), but had been forced to withdraw after discovering she was pregnant.

Actress Helena Bonham Carter took over.

McCrory was good at playing villains - the evil alien Rosanna Calvierri in an episode of Doctor Who in 2010; the spiritualist Evelyn Poole in the series Penny Dreadful (2014 to 2016); and, perhaps most notably, Polly Gray, aunt of gang boss Tommy Shelby on the period crime drama Peaky Blinders, a role she played for its five-season run from 2013 to 2019.

McCrory met Lewis in 2003, when they were appearing in playwright Joanna Laurens' Five Gold Rings at the Almeida Theatre in London. They had two children, daughter Manon in 2006 and son Gulliver in 2007, and married in 2007.

Although Lewis, 50, also found fame on the television series Homeland (2011 to 2020) and Billions (2016 to present), they maintained a low-key life in London.

NYTIMES