British actress Helena Bonham Carter speaking with a Jewish woman whose family escaped Czechoslovakia with the help of the actress’ grandmother, Violet Bonham Carter. Photo: Screenshot/”My Grandparents’ War.”
Actress Helena Bonham Carter said in a new interview that, because of her Jewish heritage, she felt she was destined to play her role in the new film One Life, which is about British stockbroker Sir Nicholas Winton and his efforts to save 669 Jewish children from the Nazis before the outbreak of World War II.
In the BBC Films and See-Saw Films production, Bonham Carter plays Winton’s German-Jewish mother, Babette “Babi” Wertheim. Two-time Oscar winner Anthony Hopkins and Johnny Flynn both play Winton at different ages, and the cast also includes Jonathan Pryce, Lena Olin, Romola Garai, and Alex Sharp.
“It was in my DNA to play this role because I come from Austrian Jewish heritage,” Bonham Carter told Britain’s Jewish News. “And on top of that, on both sides, both my grandparents helped a lot of Jewish people with visas to get out of Nazi Europe.”
Bonham Carter discovered in 2021 that her maternal Jewish grandfather, Eduardo Propper de Callejon, was a Spanish diplomat who defied government orders to help save thousands of French Jews during the Holocaust and that her British paternal grandmother, Lady Violet Bonham Carter, was a politician and volunteer air raid warden who helped Jews from around Europe find refuge in Britain. The latter also sponsored a family from Prague who had escaped Nazi persecution.
Bonham Carter said the role of Babette in One Life “resonated on a different level” because of her Jewish background.
“My great grandmother was Austrian. So most people in my family will recognize my great granny who just popped up when I put on the accent and the clothes. So in a way, she just came to life,” explained the BAFTA-award winning actress. “So there was a lot of overlap with my actual history. I felt when asked to do it that it was in the stars. I was compelled to do it.”
Bonham Carter also said she “loved the idea of being able to say I was Anthony Hopkins’ mom.”
Winton organized a rescue mission that brought approximately 669 children, mostly Jewish, safely from Czechoslovakia to Britain, in an effort later known as the Kindertransport. He raised money to fund the transports and also found British foster families to care for the children. He did not publicize his heroic efforts, even after the war, but they were brought to light in 1988 during an episode of the television program That’s Life. Winton, who was nicknamed “British Schindler” after German Holocaust rescuer Oscar Schindler, died in 2015 at the age of 106.
Bonham Carter told Jewish News that One Life could be “hugely educational” in terms of teaching audiences about the Holocaust.
“The story is about someone who does such a humanitarian act and I think it’s quite empowering because it makes most of us feel utterly impotent in the face of world disaster,” she said. “You have this man who stubbornly, with his mom, worked out how to extract these children from horrendous circumstances. It’s absolutely crucial to Holocaust education but also crucial to any kind of humanitarian realm.”
The actress also indicated she thinks the film is extremely timely considering the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas terrorists controlling the Gaza Strip, which started after the Oct. 7 deadly terrorist attack that Hamas perpetrated in southern Israel.
“Nicky says that what we can learn from history is that nobody ever learns from history,” Bonham Carter added, referencing Winton’s biography. “Maybe we can learn from him. When we filmed it this time last year, it was in the middle of the Ukrainian crisis, so obviously there were refugee children and it was incredibly relevant what we were filming. And now it’s smack in the middle of this horrendous situation [the Israel-Hamas war].”
One Life is currently playing in theaters in the United Kingdom. Watch the film’s trailer below.
