A royal good time

It's been a grand year for madness and royalty in castle corridors for Helena Bonham Carter. "Oh, yes, I do know a good stone floor," the actress said with a thoughtful nod. "Queens and witches, that's what I've done lately."

Bonham Carter was a scene stealer as the raving Red Queen in Disney's Alice in Wonderland and now as the gleefully sadistic witch Bellatrix Lestrange in the latest Harry Potter film.

In a more stately mode, the 44-year-old star is being called an early Oscar favourite for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth in The King's Speech, which is the opening film of Dubai International Film Festival.

That's all lovely, the mother of two says, but really she will look back on her 2010 films as successes because she was able to work with sparkling co-stars and filmmakers but also limit her time on sets so she could focus on the parenting class she's taking in London.

Alice was a fast shoot because so much of the film was made by computer and animation wizards, and for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, her character sears her way into the audience's memory with surprisingly limited onscreen time.

"It's been perfect for me as a mum," Bonham Carter said over lunch during a recent whirlwind visit to Los Angeles. "Darling, I'm a bit bedraggled today, but I'm going home this afternoon. I was barely here at all. It's been a quick in-and-out for Los Angeles this time."

‘Refreshing'

The second part of Deathly Hallows will close out the franchise next summer, and Bonham Carter will have appeared in four of the eight movies. For the actress, it was something akin to working with an elite theatre group that just happened to make blockbuster special-effects movies.

"There's nothing like it, it's been a nice tribe," she said. "I love going back year after year. It's refreshing. A lot of times in this business, it's so transitory — it's just 10 weeks here or there on a movie and then it's over — but to see the same people over all that time, a decade, makes you feel really safe and secure."

Bonham Carter lives in London's Belsize Park area, in a house next door to that of filmmaker Tim Burton, the father of her children and her director in Alice and five other films, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

Their son, Billy, turned 7 in October, and their daughter, Nell, will be 3 this month. Over lunch, the woman who now portrays the Queen Mum on screen — and has watched the young Potter stars grow into young adults — frequently framed her life pursuits and career with the imagery of parenting.

Mad-child category

"The roles I've been playing seem to be mad children or mothers, I wonder what that means," she said, putting her palm to her cheek in mock alarm. The Red Queen of Wonderland falls into the mad-child category, with her tantrums, jealousies and screaming id.

In Potter, there's also a Screaming Mimi personality and startling body count, but Bonham Carter took the role to places that weren't made evident in J.K. Rowling's novels.

"Bellatrix has really good fun, and she's been a bit of surprise to me, in fact," Bonham Carter said.

There's often nervous laughter when Bellatrix is on screen, and for the actress, that's the sound of success.

"I just felt she had to make an impression because there wasn't much time in which to do so. And she had to be terrifying. She needed to be somebody you didn't know what to feel towards. One moment she's horribly revolting but then also weirdly sexy, maybe, or just disturbing."

In The King's Speech, she portrays the Queen Mother in the 1930s, a woman of resolve and energy as the world darkened with the rise of Adolf Hitler.

"She was quite strong and dynamic and born to be in public, and her husband was not born with that innate confidence needed to be a king," Bonham Carter said.

"He drew on her strength, and I tried to show that strength." Bonham Carter said that on her home front, she found strength wasn't enough when it to came to parenting. The actress said she grew weary of "becoming this policewoman, this negative being and nagger" when dealing with her children, so she sought out therapeutic assistance of her own.

"The parenting bit is much harder than the acting bit," she said. "You just never know what to do. So me and Tim were sort of fed up with getting hurt. ‘What do we now?' But the parenting class has been really useful. It's a bit like Parenting Anonymous. There's a group of parents just spewing out their latest trauma of the week. ‘I'm Helena, and I'm a mother.' But there are some basics that are so helpful."