HOLLYWOOD - Looks like Tim Burton is moving on.The quirky director has split with his longtime girlfriend, Lisa Marie Smith and has taken up with Planet of the Apes star Helena Bonham Carter.
Melody Korenbrot, the spokeswoman for the English actress, told Reuters, "It is a brand new relationship. Nobody knows where it's headed yet." She added that the couple will celebrate their three-week anniversary next Monday.
The 43-year-old director had met Smith, who has appeared in several Burton films including Apes, Mars Attacks! and Ed Wood, in the early 1990s after his marriage to German painter Lena Gieseke had broken up. Burton described Smith recently in an August issue of Playboy as someone who "keeps a certain heartbeat going in my life."
Bonham Carter had been tied to actor/director Kenneth Branagh in the late '90s after the two met on the set of Branagh's 1994 Frankenstein. Branagh was married to Oscar-winning actress Emma Thompson at the time.