Drama queen

Why film star Helena Bonham Carter is playing a forgotten soap star in a new television drama.

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Helena Bonham Carter has done posh, goth and quirky, and she's played a royal or three. She was Princess Margaret in The Crown, Margaret's mum Elizabeth in The King's Speech and the Red Queen in the Alice in Wonderland movies.

Now she's another sovereign and another real card - "Queen of the Midlands" Noele "Nolly" Gordon. In the 1970s UK soap Crossroads, Gordon's character Meg Mortimer ruled the series much like Elsie Tanner did on Coronation Street.

Or she did, until 1981, when Gordon was unceremoniously axed by the bosses at Associated Television (ATV), where she had had a career since the mid-1950s as a pioneering presenter and producer before the soap started in 1964.

The national uproar over her sacking and her defiant last months as a television star are the starting points for Nolly, an ITV drama starring Bonham Carter, who, but for Gordon's flaming red hair, might recall one of her previous characters.

"At first look, I thought she's got the same armour and uniform, in a way, as Princess Margaret did with the fur coat and the cigarette in The Crown," she says. "Although she wasn't posh, she had that grandeur.

"I found her ferocity, her sheer spirit, really inspiring and hilarious, too. She's a powerful woman. For a woman who was forced to retire, there was nothing remotely retiring about her as a personality."