A pie-in-the-sky dream come true

LONDON -- "I remember courting over 'Sweeney,' " says Helena Bonham Carter, 8 1/2 months pregnant, perched on the edge of a sofa in a hotel room in late November, looking as if she might give birth at any second. "I remember us listening to the whole score one Saturday, six years ago, and him even mentioning then, 'One day . . . .' It was definitely something we had in common."

The "him," of course, is Tim Burton, Bonham Carter's off-screen partner of six years, father of her two children (Billy, 4, and their infant daughter, born in mid-December) and director of "Sweeney Todd," in which Bonham Carter stars opposite Johnny Depp as Mrs. Lovett, a widowed baker in Victorian London who uses the flesh of the victims Todd murders as the filling for her meat pies.

In Burton's film, she's younger than her onstage counterparts, more flirtatious, less "Broadway," with a touch of Baby Jane about her. "You can play it so broadly and quite crudely, and in a way she's been played almost like straight out of music hall," explains Bonham Carter, 41. "But it wouldn't play well on film. Certainly Tim wouldn't allow me, because his tastes are so anti-theatrical."

Restraint, quite literally, was a hallmark of Bonham Carter's early career, which began in 1984, when the actress made her film debut as England's nine-day queen in "Lady Jane." For the next decade, she would earn a reputation as Britain's "corset queen," Merchant Ivory's doe-eyed, alabaster-skinned, go-to girl for E.M. Forster adaptations -- appearing in "A Room With a View" as the parasol-twirling Lucy and a string of other period costume dramas, including "Maurice," "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and "Howards End."

Bonham Carter's career trajectory began to change after a turn as an unfaithful wife in Woody Allen's "Mighty Aphrodite" in 1995, though she would earn an Oscar nomination three years later for yet another period costumer, the Henry James adaptation "The Wings of the Dove." Since then, though, she's played an eclectic mix of characters -- a junkie in "Novocaine," chain-smoking femme fatale in "Fight Club" and leather-clad Bellatrix Lestrange in "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," a role she's set to reprise in the next installment of the franchise, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince."