Helena Interviews

First off, I'm not sure if I've already posted this or not but it showed up in my mailbox again and it's a good interview so here it is:

'I would have tried anything'

Andrea Manzi-Davies
November 8, 2007
Page 1 of 3 | Single page

Desperate for a second baby, Helena Bonham Carter explored all kinds of therapy but nature surprised her.

Pregnancy at 41 certainly agrees with Helena Bonham Carter. Almost eight months into carrying her second child, vibrant and beaming, she is licking big globules of Marmite - her latest craving - off her fingers. She knows she is lucky. Not because of her successful acting career maintained over 25 years but because, after trying for two long years, she managed to conceive naturally.

Bonham Carter already has one son, Billy Ray, four, with her partner, the cult film director Tim Burton, best known for the gothic Edward Scissorhands and two of the Batman films.

But she was desperate to have a second child. While more women are becoming mothers over the age of 40 - in Britain there has been a 50 per cent increase in the past 10 years - Bonham Carter was aware that only 7.8 per cent of women over the age of 42 are able to conceive with their own eggs. So, like many women in her position, the actress, whose career has moved from playing Merchant Ivory heroines to the evil Bellatrix Lestrange in the Harry Potter movies, was open to all options.

Bonham Carter is renowned for her interest in alternative therapies but after trying and failing to get pregnant she decided to try conventional fertility medicine. The experience was not a happy one. She took a fertility drug called Clomid, which stimulates egg production, after being told she might not have been ovulating. The drug, which was also taken by Jools Oliver, wife of chef Jamie Oliver, tells the brain that not enough oestrogen is being produced.

Bonham Carter is angry she was not warned about potential side effects.

"I had a terrible reaction to it," she says. "Many people think it is the only thing that's going to make them ovulate but as it turned out I was ovulating anyway. It stressed me out beyond belief.

"Hormonally, I was all over the shop and I got really low emotionally. Lots of people don't have that reaction but on the internet I found a Clomid club, with people who react to the stuff discussing it online."

Reassured she was not the only one to suffer this way, she stopped using it and concentrated on alternative therapies.

"I tried acupuncture two years ago," Bonham Carter says.

"I went to a Chinese acupuncturist. She kept saying that I was 'too weak, too weak' and gave me several types of tea to help build my strength up."

read the rest Here.

Next is an awesome video I just had to put up, here it is chowzer!



And finaly, from Helena-World:
an Oxfam Video