The woman who helps actors get into character — in a very unconventional way

By Susan Griffin, CNN

(CNN) — When Helena Bonham Carter walked onto the set of 2012’s Dark Shadows movie, she was stinking of bourbon whiskey and Gauloises cigarettes.

Her character was a chain-smoking alcoholic psychiatrist, but Bonham Carter hadn’t gone “method”; she had simply spritzed herself with a bespoke fragrance created specifically for her by fragrance designer Azzi Glasser.

Having met by chance at their children’s school gates in London, the two have collaborated on countless projects over the years, beginning with the 2009 period drama “Enid,” for which Glasser concocted a perfume that evoked “stale white face powder that immediately took me back to the 1950s,” recalled Bonham Carter who was playing author Enid Blyton.

Glasser has also fashioned a dark blend of foxglove, poison hemlock and belladonna for Bellatrix Lestrange in the “Harry Potter” films, a chocolate chilli-scented fragrance for the Red Queen character in “Alice in Wonderland,” and what Glasser describes as a mixture of “old, cracked soap with a ‘pissy’ note to it” for the role of Miss Havisham in 2012’s “Great Expectations.”

“Helena couldn’t wait to get into rehearsals with that one,” said Glasser who is famed for having one of the best ‘noses’ in the business and prides herself on elevating an A-lister’s presence through her visceral scent blends.

Born in the UK, Glasser spent her early formative years in India before returning to London. She worked for British fragrance house CPL Aromas for 20 years before creating the iconic Agent Provocateur fragrance in 2000, and in 2016, founded her own brand, The Perfumer’s Story by Azzi. Now, a bespoke fragrance from Glasser can cost up to £15,000 ($19,000), though she also offers a lower-priced collection of fragrances to enable people to discover their own fragrance DNA.

Her roster of celebrity clients include actors Alicia Vikander, Noomi Rapace, Damian Lewis, Orlando Bloom, and Stephen Fry, as well as musicians Kylie Minogue and Adam Lambert. But it was Bonham Carter who introduced her “secret perfumer” to a curious Johnny Depp on the set of “Dark Shadows.” Depp promptly instructed Glasser to create a bespoke scent for his own character, a vampire called Barnabas, and they continued to work together. “Azzi possesses a certain sorcery in that she is capable of capturing the perfect essence of a character in scent,” he said of Glasser’s work.

The perfumer believes that fragrance helps to truly understand the essence of a character. “We’ll meet up to talk about the role, the styling, who the director is, who the other actors are, the space, atmosphere, where they might be filming, whether it will be cold or hot… There are many elements at play. I’ll then go and start trialing and tweaking (the scent) until it’s absolutely perfect. I have never had anyone say, ‘no, it’s not quite right’,” said Glasser who can spend anything from a week to three months to create a custom-made scent.

The result is not always positively fragrant, as with Jude Law’s depiction of an aging, ulcerated Henry VIII in the upcoming movie Firebrand.

“I worked with Jude on “The Young Pope.” He came to the studio and told me, ‘I want to smell exactly like Henry.’ I told him, you know it’s going to smell repulsive, right?”

The result was a heady brew of smells evoking gout, bad breath and excrement.

“It was interesting because the other actors were affected by his presence, this power and manipulative stinkiness, as in real life. Whereas Henry could just (mask his own scent by) sniffing a handkerchief that smelt of rose.”

Brad Pitt is on her wish list of collaborators, alongside Julia Roberts and Leonardo DiCaprio, although she has made headway with the latter, she revealed.

“I met him at (a London restaurant) recently and he gave me his number,” says Glasser, who will soon be working with Austin Butler following his visit to her studio in north London alongside his model girlfriend Kaia Gerber.

But whether she’s mixing a tailored fragrance for an exclusive venue, such as London’s Chiltern Firehouse, or an affluent individual — as she has done for Cindy Crawford (a 50th birthday present from her husband Rande Gerber), and David Linley, son of Princess Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones — Glasser approaches each scent as an entirely new landscape.

“David called it a fun therapy session,” she laughs. “But it is learning about the person, or history, the character, style and so on,” said Glasser who called fragrance “the love of my life.”

But it’s Hollywood’s A-listers who seem to benefit the most from a one-of-a-kind aroma.

“As actors know, fragrance can transform you and take you on a journey. It opens up passages and doors in the brain, working through the olfactory system to bring out emotions,” noted Glasser. “It can make you feel more confident, powerful, desirable and assertive, and affect how others react to you. Essentially, scent tells a story.”

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