Wonder of two

THEY’RE sisters but as different as chalk and cheese. The Red Queen is the tyrannical monarch of Underland, much given to ordering people’s heads to be chopped off. Her younger sibling, the White Queen, is much nicer but with designs on the throne and crown that sister Iracebeth stole from her.

To play the tyrannical Red Queen in Tim Burton’s new film version of Alice In Wonderland, Helena Bonham Carter was inspired by her and Burton’s two-year-old daughter Nell.

The Red Queen rules the roost with cries of “Off with their head” if anyone upsets her. Bonham Carter had a few character pointers from director and real life partner Burton, whom she met when he cast her as a ape in his Planet Of The Apes remake.

“He said watch The Private Lives Of Elizabeth And Essex, it was Bette Davis playing Elizabeth. Then Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest,” she recalls.

Then she spoke to the film’s writer Linda Woolverton who told her about the Red Queen’s big head – which is out of proportion to her body – and “it made sense that she chops off other people’s heads because she feels jealous of their normal-sized heads.

“I thought that she’s probably a toddler. She’s a toddler tyrant – toddlers are tyrants. They’ve got no sympathy for any other living creatures, so the toddler thing was a big thing.

“And to tell you the truth, after shouting all day I didn’t actually have a voice after lunch. So I didn’t speak much, except on set, which was probably what Tim wanted.”

She says that Nell wasn’t scared by the film. When Burton was being interviewed on breakfast television, Nell wanted to see more of the monsters from the movie not her father. Older brother Billy, who’s six, is more sensitive and Bonham Carter isn’t sure what he’ll make of it.

The Red Queen is an amalgam of the Queen of Hearts from Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland and the Red Queen from Through The Looking Glass.

“She’s got emotional problems,” says Bonham Carter a little unnecessarily.

“It takes nothing, practically, for her to lose her temper. Her tantrums are that of a twoyear- old.”

While her head is digitally increased to around twice its normal size for the final film, she still had to endure a daily visit to the makeup chair to be transformed into the Red Queen.

It took about three hours. “But I love being royal,” she says. “The big hazard was I lost my voice pretty much every day by ten o’clock because she shouts a lot. It’s quite exhausting losing your temper all the time.”

SHE made her name as a princess and now she’s a queen. Anne Hathaway is making her way up the royal ladder.

The Princess Diaries and its sequel brought her to the attention to the cinema-going public before she went up against Meryl Streep’s tyrannical magazine editor in The Devil Wears Prada and played writer Jane Austen in the biopic Becoming Jane.

In Alice In Wonderland, Hathaway’s White Queen has a touch of Nigella Lawson about her. That idea about the TV cook was planted by director Burton.

“I never say to anybody ‘do this or do that’. The joy for me is to see what these great actors do with the character,” he says. “I may give a few hints and I might have mentioned her.

I dropped it in, but didn’t dwell on it or anything. We talked about lots of other different things.”

Hathaway herself found the Nigella reference very helpful. “The way she’s so passionate about food and especially her descriptions of it. That was a help to me in the cooking scene, more so when she’s in the kitchen that any of the other scenes,” she explains.

“I’m misquoting her but Nigella is always talking about ‘a cacophony of flavours that jump out’. I wanted to give The White Queen a kind of sensuality in the kitchen. Of course, she’s talking about battered fingers and things like that... and then makes herself retch.” Lawson wasn’t the only influence on her performance.

Hathaway envisaged her as a punk rock, vegan pacifist. “So I listened to a lot of Blondie, I watched a lot of Greta Garbo movies, and I looked at the artwork of Dan Flavin. Then a little bit of Norma Desmond got thrown in there too. And she just kind of emerged,” she says.

When she came on board the project, Burton talked a lot about the relationship between the sisters, the Red and the White Queens.

“She comes from the same gene pool as the Red Queen. She really likes the dark side, but she’s so scared of going too far into it that she’s made everything appear very light and happy,” says Hathaway, recently seen as one of the ensemble cast of the romantic comedy Valentine’s Day.

“But she’s living in that place out of fear that she won’t be able to control herself. There’s a lot to play around in.

It was awesome. I had so much fun.”

Two-time costume designing Oscar winner Colleen Attwood saw the White Queen’s dress as much more glam than her wicked sister’s outfit.

“She’s the Beverly Hills version of the Red Queen,” she says.

“There’s something of the sisterhood in their silhouettes and the shape of their clothes and the feeling of them, so it ties them together. Her dress has lots of layers of fabric, with silkscreen snowflakes and metallic foil prints to give it sparkle. And she’s got lots of jewels added to give it a little bling.”

Hathaway calls it “grand and the most fragile dress I’ve ever worn in my life”. “It’s beautiful. If you ever had a dream of being any kind of fairy princess, this is the dress you would wear. I love the idea that it’s this idealised, fairy tale Queen but it’s in a Tim Burton movie so there’s darkness mixed up with it as well.”

■ Alice In Wonderland (PG) opens in cinemas tomorrow.