In August of 2008, several members of Helena Bonham Carter’s family were on a vacation in South Africa and were traveling via a minivan. Then, one of the minivan’s tires suddenly burst which sent the vehicle flipping through the air several times. In the immediate aftermath, one of Bonham Carter’s cousins named Fiona Egerton-Warburton managed to drag herself away from the accident with a broken collarbone. Fiona’s 16-year-old son Piers suffered whiplash injuries from the accident.
Tragically for Helena Bonham Carter, every other member of her family who was in the South African minivan during the crash lost their life. Among the crash victims who died were 74-year-old Francis Kirkwood, 55-year-old Kay Patricia Bonham Carter, 74-year-old Brenda Bonham Carter, and Graham Bonham Carter. Even though Helena’s cousin Fiona Egerton-Warburton survived the crash, her 14-year-old son Marcus Egerton-Warburton lost his life.
At the time of the crash that took the lives of several of her family members, Helena Bonham Carter was working on the movie Terminator Salvation. Unsurprisingly, Bonham Carter left the set of the film so she could travel back to England reportedly with her partner at the time, Tim Burton, to be there for her family. In the aftermath, an insider described Bonham Carter as being “numb with grief” and in a “state of shock”.
Eventually able to return to the set of Terminator Salvation, Helena Bonham Carter has managed to keep going after suffering the kind of tragedy that is difficult to even imagine for almost everyone. Of course, it seems very likely that Bonham Carter will always be affected by what happened for the rest of her life but she clearly is a survivor.