Actress Helen McCrory has died after a battle with cancer. Her husband, actor Damian Lewis, announced the sad news on Friday.
Lewis and McCrory had been married since 2007 and shared two children together — 14-year-old daughter Mannon and 13-year-old son Gulliver. Lewis said she died peacefully at home.
“I’m heartbroken to announce that after a heroic battle with cancer, the beautiful and mighty woman that is Helen McCrory has died peacefully at home, surrounded by a wave of loss from friends and family,” Lewis wrote in a statement he shared on social media. “She died as she lived. Fearlessly. God we love her and know how lucky we are to have had her in our lives. She blazed so brightly. Go now, Little One, into the air, and thank you.”
McCrory played Narcissa Malfoy in the Harry Potter films and her other screen credits include Peaky Blinders, Penny Dreadful and Fearless. In a 2011 interview with the Evening Standard, Lewis talked about the early days of their relationship.
“Helen and I partied very, very hard before we met and then we collided at the Almeida in 2004 [in Five Gold Rings] and together we partied even harder,” he shared. “We used to lose entire evenings listening to jazz at Ronnie Scott’s. We love to dance, and when we weren’t out we’d put on music really loudly and dance around the house, just the two of us.”
He also talked about how he proposed to her and their sweet annual tradition.
“I proposed to Helen in Paris. I tried to do it on the Pont Neuf – I was sweating bullets and wrestling in my overcoat pocket for the ring, which had got stuck in a little Cellophane bag, but when I finally got it out, a gaggle of Japanese tourists surrounded us like a flock of seagulls, taking pictures, and the moment was totally destroyed,” he recalled. “I now take Helen back to Paris for three days without our two kids every February for our anniversary. We walk about the city, and sit in bars drinking rosé.”
