Bonham Carter was born in Golders Green, London. Her mother, Elena (née Propper de Callejón), is a psychotherapist. Her father, Raymond Bonham Carter, was a merchant banker and the alternate UK director representing the Bank of England at the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C. during the 1960s; he came from a famous British political family, being the son of Maurice Bonham Carter and Violet Bonham Carter, Baroness Asquith of Yarnbury (whose father was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, H. H. Asquith). Bonham Carter's maternal grandfather, Eduardo Propper de Callejón, was of half Spanish and half Jewish ancestry, and served as a diplomat and former Minister-Counsellor at the Spanish Embassy in Washington, D.C. Bonham Carter's Jewish maternal grandmother, Hélène Fould-Springer, was the daughter of Baron Eugène Fould-Springer (a French-born banker who was a cousin of Achille Fould), and Mitzi Springer (whose father was the industrialist Baron Gustav Springer). Hélène Fould-Springer's sister was the French philanthropist Liliane de Rothschild (1916–2003), the wife of Baron Élie de Rothschild, and her other sister, Therese, was the mother of British writer David Pryce-Jones.Bonham Carter was in a relationship with actor Kenneth Branagh (with whom she appeared in several films) from 1994 to the summer of 1999. She then briefly dated actors Rufus Sewell and Steve Martin. In October 2001, she began her current relationship with director Tim Burton, whom she met while filming Planet of the Apes. She has appeared in all of his subsequent films. They live in Belsize Park, London, in adjoining houses with a connecting hallway, each part decorated and styled to suit their own personalities, because they felt they couldn't live 'together' but didn't want to live apart. They purchased the house when she became pregnant with the couple's first child, son Billy Ray Burton, who was born on 4 October 2003. At age 41, she gave birth to her second child, a daughter named Nell, on 15 December 2007 in Central London. She says she named her daughter Nell after all the "Helens" in her family lineage.
Bonham Carter has two brothers, Edward and Thomas, and is a cousin of actor Crispin Bonham-Carter, who played Mr. Bingley in the 1995 BBC production of Pride and Prejudice. Bonham Carter was educated at the South Hampstead High School, a girls' independent school in Hampstead, London and later at Westminster School, a co-educational independent school near the Palace of Westminster.
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