Name : Helen Mirren
Born : 26 July 1945 (Age: 65)
Birth Place : Ilford, England
Height : 5' 4"
Awards : Won 4 BAFTAs, 1 Oscar and 3 Golden Globes
Occupation : Actor
Years active : 1965–present
Spouse : Taylor Hackford(1997–present)
BIOGRAPHY & CAREER
Many actresses have been considered sex symbols. Brigitte Bardot, Gina Lollobrigida and Jennifer Lopez are just a few to have been famed for setting male pulses racing. Far fewer have been considered hugely talented as well as super-sexy, Michelle Pfeiffer and Jessica Lange being just two capable of arousing both the body and the intellect. And no one has been considered super-sexy and hugely talented for quite as long as Helen Mirren. A wholly inflammatory character, she’s been one of the UK’s top thespians, a star of stage and screen, and a hot pin-up for over 40 years. Now past 60, she’s still up for the world’s most prestigious acting awards, and still being talked about in terms of her sexuality. Unbelievable.
And she’s an Essex girl. Kind of. Helen’s grandfather was Russian, Pyotr Vasielivich Mironov, an aristocrat connected to the military. The son of a countess and a senior military officer, he rose swiftly through the army's ranks. He came to London to buy arms to aid his countrymen in the Russo-Japanese war, living in luxury in the Russian embassy with his wife, Marusia and sending son Basil to a private school. He then founded himself stranded due to the Bolshevik revolution, leaving six sisters on the family estate at Gzhatsk, near Smolensk (Gzhatsk was in 1968 renamed Gagarin after cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, born in the nearby village of Klushino). During the revolution, the sisters would be forced to leave their home and live in a crammed flat in Moscow, the family losing their property and status forever and really only being saved from a sorry death by one of the sisters, Valentina, marrying a high-ranking communist official. Interestingly, given Helen's later career, Valentina would be a typist fro the great Stanislavsky. Forced to leave the Russia embassy and now jobless and homeless, Pyotr would take a job as a cab driver. The poverty and loss of status would take its toll, and he'd separate from Marusia in 1928.
And the family did have status. When, in later years, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Mirren and her sister Katherine did some research into their background, they found that they were descended from famed military dynasty the Kamenskys. Field Marshal Mikhail Kamensy had enjoyed success in the Russo-Turkish war of 1768-1774 and been awarded the Order of St George of the Second Class, the highest Russian military honour. In 1806 he'd be made Commander in Chief of the Russian army fighting Napoleon but, not up to the job, would be sacked the next year. Two years after that he'd be axed to death by a 15-year-old boy, the brother of one of Mikhail's young concubines. Mikhail's son Nikolay, meanwhile, was also a lauded general.
Having lost 1600 men at Austerlitz, he gained a reputation for risking men's lives, but also for great daring, and triumphed during the 1808 war against the Swedes and the Russo-Turkish war of 1806-1812. Risk-taking, sex and controversy clearly run in the family.
Helen's father Vasily, who’d been brought to London when only two, was something of a musician. A viola player with the London Philharmonic, he'd also work in a fabric warehouse in the East End, where he'd meet his future wife, Kathleen Rogers (known as Kat). She was a working class girl from West Ham and the youngest of fourteen kids, with perhaps a splash of gypsy blood. Her family were butchers by trade, indeed their claim to fame was that her granddad had been butcher to Queen Victoria. During the Second World War, Basil would not be permitted to join the army, instead driving an ambulance in the Blitzed East End. Later, as his family grew, he'd become a cabbie, like his father had. Later still he'd be a driving test examiner and then would achieve a bureaucratic post in the Minstry of Transport.
Vasily was fluent in Russian but wanted a clean break from the past, wanted his family to blend in to this strange society (he'd call himself Basil and anglicized their surname). In this he'd be aided by Helen's mother. Though the family would observe Russian Orthodox holidays and Helen and Katherine would be taught something of their roots, no Russian would be spoken in the house, the girls would be encouraged to fit in to their south-eastern surroundings.
This is the Essex connection. Before Helen was born, her parents moved out to Ilford where they both worked at a jacquard fabric shop. These were times of turmoil in the East End, even before the Blitz. Helen’s dad was often in fights with Oswald Mosley’s black shirts. A socialist with communist leanings (oddly, given what had happened to his own family), he would later watch in horror as, back home, Stalin turned the communist dream into a nightmare of secrecy, paranoia and murder.
Helen herself was born Ilyena Lydia Mironoff on the 27th of July, 1945, two months after the end of the war. She was born at Queen Charlotte's Maternity Hospital on Goldhawk Road, Hammersmith, originally an isolation unit for women suffering from puerperal fever but in 1940 combining with the Queen's Lying-In Hospital, which had been in Marylebone. The birth would last an amazingly sdhort 20 minutes. Katherine was older, by two years, and there'd be a younger brother, Peter, born in 1948. When Peter was born the family would move out to Westcliff-On-Sea, then on to Leigh-On-Sea, both part of Southend on the end of the Thames estuary. From the age of 6, Helen recalls wanting to be an actress. And not just any old actress. She wanted to act in an “old-fashioned and traditional sense”.
She performed onstage at school, making a debut as the Virgin Mary as Hamlet Court primary school in Westcliff, then at 8 was disappointed to be merely a blackbird, sitting resentfully in a giant pie in a production of Four And Twenty Blackbirds for an end-of-year show. She'd later attend St Bernard’s Convent High School for Girls in Westcliff, set up by Bernardine Sisters on Milton Road, and dreamt of being a Shakespearean heroine. She says she was obsessed with the Bard by the age of 13, having been drawn to him by the character of Joan Of Arc in Henry VI. “She was portrayed as the wicked witch,” she recalled later “I loved her for that”. Strangely, Helen was not a big fan of the movies - the stage was her thing.
Life at home was marked by lack of money but the Mirrens still maintained a middle-class Bohemian existence. Kit, who'd left school at 14, was constantly encouraging Kate and Helen to work hard, get qualifications, go to university, become economically independent of men. Kit certainly lived to her own beat, staying in bed till 10 and hoovering at one in the morning if she hoovered at all. She would, though, make all her kids clothes. Luxury for the kids would be a scoop of Rossi's ice cream in a glass of cherryade. As she moved through her teens, Helen would work as a blagger at Southend's Kursaal amusement park, urging people to go on the rides. In her spare time she'd hang out at a coffee-bar called The Shrubbery at 15, Royal Terrace near the sea-front (it's now a restaurant called The Terrace). There'd be no heavy dating as her strict Catholic parents did not approve, though she did go out with one Jean-Louis, A French kid in Southend to learn English. she'd also sleep with a self-portrait of her hero, Goya, under her pillow.
The Mirrens lifestyle was in sharp contrast to that of their relatives in England. Basil's sister, Olga, born in Britain, had made a good first marriage to a very wealthy car salesman. and had a daughter, Tania. Olga had then married East End criminal George Dawson. In the late Fifties, Tania (known as Tania Mallet) would become a famous model and, four years older than Helen, would beat her into films, in 1964 playing Tilly Masterson in Goldfinger, trying to take revenge on Goldfinger for the death of her sister Shirley Eaton, famously found coated in gold. It would be Tania's only appearance as she'd prefer to concentrate on modelling. With Olga rich, Tania famous and George an underworld name, they'd lead glamorous lives in hotels and aboard yachts, and they'd splash the cash when they came to visit, Kat receiving expensive perfume. Seeing her cousin's success in the big leagues, Helen's own ambitions can only have been boosted.
Her parents did not think acting to be a prudent career-choice. They encouraged their daughter to enrol at teacher training college, which she dutifully did, winning a scholarship to the New College Of Speech and Drama on North End Road in Hampstead.
This had been very recently set up, in 1962, by senior staff at the speech and drama department of the Royal Academy of Music. there'd been no free space at the Academy, so they'd set it up on north end Road, in the former home of ballerina Anna Pavlova who'd lived there between 1912 and 1931. The school would provide three year courses for teachers, instructing them in all aspects of stagecraft. Before taking up this new position, Helen had already auditioned for and won a place at the National Youth Theatre. Things were looking good.
In September of 1963 she'd appear at the Scala in the NYT production of Hamlet. Simon Ward would play the lead, with Mirren playing a handmaiden to Nicola Jenkins' Ophelia. For the next two years she'd study at Hampstead and perform with the NYT, still being convinced that the steadier future option would be a career in teaching. However, this would change in September, 1965, when she was given the female lead in Antony And Cleopatra. At the Old Vic she was immediately sensational. Her Cleopatra (a role to which she would periodically return) was a revelation. Commanding, capricious, wise, and demanding, she was also overtly sexual, a quality deemed utterly contemporary, given the sexual revolution taking place at the time. Theatre needs to stay on the ball as much as any other medium.
Now 20 and with her performance as Cleopatra having won her an agent, Maggie Parker, Mirren was on the up. The reaction to her Cleopatra had convinced her that her future lay in acting, as she'd hoped, not teaching. In her personal life, too, she was thriving. Having been kept away from boys while in Southend, when she'd arrived in London she'd spread her wings somewhat and been hurt badly. Now she was in a relationship, her first decent relationship, with fellow actor Kenneth Cranham. Cranham was also a member of the NYT and then moved on to RADA. Sharing love and poverty, they'd go to restaurants and both pick at the same plate.. Mirren would later recall going with Cranham to Leicester Square to see one of the Cassius Clay - Sonny Liston fights on the big screen. In the West End they'd marvel at performances by Laurence Olivier, Joan Plowright, Maggie Smith, Frank Finlay, Geraldine McEwan, soaking it all in. When Cranham left RADA and scored his first professional job in the West End, he and Mirren would visit a posh Chinese restaurant and revel in the ordering of more than one dish.
Following her stint at the NYT, Mirren would move out into the provinces to experience the rep scene. Her first professional engagement would come in 1966 with the Century Theatre group's adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night at Manchester's University Theatre. This would be directed by group founder Braham Murray, who'd go on to found the Royal Exchange Theatre Company, and feature Dily Hamlett and Derek Fowlds, later to find fame on TV in Yes, Minister. Mirren would stay with the Century Theatre for a year or so, also appearing in their Merchant Of Venice, alongside James Maxwell. By 1967, though, she'd been snapped up by the Royal Shakespeare Company.
After making her debut in Coriolanus (starring Ian Richardson and Jeffery Dench, older brother of Judi), in many of her early appearances she'd share the stage with other RSC newcomers Patrick Stewart and Ben Kingsley, as well as the more experienced likes of Alan Howard, Norman Rodway and Janet Suzman. Also in 1967 she'd play Castiza in The Revenger's Tragedy and jilted widow's daughter Diana in All's Well That Ends Well, while 1968 would see her as the pastoral Phebe in As You Like It, Trojan beauty Cressida in Troilus And Cressida and put-upon lover Hero in Much Ado About Nothing. In 1969 the RSC would move her away from Shakespeare, casting her as Win-The-Fight Littlewit in Ben Jonson's earthy Bartholomew Fair and as Susie Monican in Sean O'Casey's The Silver Tassie, but she'd be back with the Bard the next year, as the tragic Ophelia in Hamlet, the bereaved and seduced Lady Anne in Richard III, and as Julia in Two Gentlemen Of Verona, disguising herself as a boy to win back her unfaithful lover, Proteus. Her initial run with the RSC would end in 1971, once she'd played Tatiana in Gorky's Enemies, Harriet in Etherege's Restoration comedy The Man Of Mode, Elyane in Genet's The Balcony and the title role in Miss Julie, the latter performance being committed to film and released the next year. It had been tough work throughout, with Mirren often rehearsing one play in the morning, acting in another in the afternoon and in yet another in the evening.
No overview of Mirren’s career would be complete without at least a brief discussion of the Sex Question. Many have noted the number of “sexual” roles she’s played, the number of times she’s appeared naked onstage and onscreen. Actually, she was well-known for it from her very first “proper” screen role, in 1969, and, despite her early experience with the Royal Shakespeare Company being almost entirely classical, she still became known as "the sex queen of the RSC". Indeed, her first ever film role, seldom seen, would have her hilariously sending up the use of sex by the advertising industry. This was in Don Levy's 1967 masterwork Herostratus, an extraordinary film which saw Michael Gothard as a young poet who's so disillusioned by the world that he decides to kill himself.
In order to turn his death into a statement, he hires an advertising agent who unfortunately turns the whole notion on its head so Gothard looks like an attention-seeking fool. Mirren would appear briefly in an advert being filmed. First covered by a pink wrap, she's quickly shrugs it off to reveal a skimpy purple bodice. Her first words onscreen are "Do you want me?" before she comically explains what the viewer will have to get for her - not horses or Cadillacs or even a snakeskin parasol (with two knobs!), but a pair of the orange rubber gloves she's there to flog. Blonde and remorselessly sexy, she's coy, seductive and laughably forward, caressing her legs and heavily promoting her breasts. The sequence ends with Mirren being thrusting screaming over a man's shoulder and carried through the cameras and crew. It was a classic debut, knowing and really funny.
But to view Mirren as ever having been a mere sex kitten is a mistake. As said, she arrived on the scene at the height of the sexual revolution, when women, empowered by the Pill and a liberalization of attitudes, were at last experimenting with freedom and power. Mirren’s performances were a reflection of this and also a catalyst for further change. Where earlier actresses had to find other ways to portray desire and vulnerability in all their nakedness, the times allowed Mirren more scope, and she took it.
This is not to say that Helen overly concentrated on her characters’ sexuality, she didn’t. But sexuality is a prime mover in most matters, and she showed it. Indeed, she showed everything - rage, dignity, jealousy, playfulness, madness, sorrow, steadfastness. The sexual aspect just added to (and helped explain) the hugely satisfying complexity of her performances. One critic said she was “too intelligent to be easily typecast as a temptress” and it was generally agreed that her combination of physicality and cerebral command was transforming women’s roles. Her nudity was controversial, of course, but more importantly, wherever she went, the debate over female empowerment and sexual justice raged. Of the Lady Macbeth she delivered opposite Nicol Williamson on a brief return to the RSC in 1974 it was written “It would be mere male chauvinism to deny that Miss Mirren plays everyone else off the stage”. She was a sexual pioneer, and as such she suffered the smutty comments of those whose seedy attitudes she sought to alter.
Onscreen, due to her concentration on the stage work, Mirren's career would not really take off until the very late 1970s. She'd played Hermia to Judi Dench’s Titania in Peter Hall’s filmed production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Then, in ’69, came her screen debut proper in Age Of Consent. Famed director Michael Powell had caught on to her sexiness and charisma and cast her as Cora Ryan, a young girl who re-inspires jaded artist James Mason on an island in the Great Barrier Reef. Mirren's precocious performance and the 40-year age-gap between the lovers would cause a mild sensation - adding, of course, to Mirren's fast-growing reputation.
The Seventies saw Mirren experimenting like crazy, seriously pushing back the envelope. Onscreen, she was impressive in Balzac’s Cousin Bette and in that filming of Strindberg’s Miss Julie, playing a noblewoman who engages in inappropriate and thoroughly damaging congress with a servant. More controversial still were Ken Russell’s Savage Messiah, about the young French sculptor Henri Gaudier, and Lindsay Anderson’s surreal anti-corporate comedy O Lucky Man!
It wasn’t all plain sailing. At one point, in her early twenties, she’s said, she got so “depressed and f***ed up” she visited an Indian hand-reader. She'd been crying constantly and had developed a form of OCD, being unable to walk down the middle of the pavement or touch metal. He told her that her success would not peak till her late forties. It had been a calming thought and quite liberating, allowing her to take risks without worry. In 1972 she joined Peter Brook’s International Centre of Theatre Research, touring in Africa and America. In Africa, the troupe would perform for and exchange stories with far-flung tribes, learning and teaching as they went. In America, they approached the Native Americans in the same way. Helen also received a permanent reminder of her visit. On an Indian reservation in Minnesota, drunk on brandy, she had an Indian symbol tattooed between the thumb and forefinger of her left hand. The symbol meant Equality - which is what she stands for most of all. “I haven’t had it removed”, she’s said “because it’s a reminder that I was sometimes a bad girl in the past”. Fans play a game where they try to spot the tattoo in Helen’s movies - often it’s covered up, but not always.
Helen was now coming into her own. Onstage there was that classic Lady Macbeth. She was excellent as the alcoholic rock singer in David Hare's Teeth 'n' Smiles at the Royal Court, brilliant as an over-sexed Nina in The Seagull. That same year, 1975, she'd be Ella in The Bed Before Yesterday at the Lyric, Hammersmith, a comedy of sexual manners written by the 90-year-old Ben Travers, who’d penned many of the classic Aldwych farces of the Twenties. Like The Seagull, it was directed by her O Lucky Man! helmsman, Lindsay Anderson.
Mirren would also, where she could, enjoy a contemporary Bohemian lifestyle. When back at the RSC for Macbeth she'd be dating George Galitzine, actually Prince George Rudolf Galitzine, also from an aristocratic Russian family, indeed a direct descendant of Catherine the Great. His grandfather, Vladimir, had been aide de camp to Grand Duke Nikolai Nikoleavich, commander of the Russian army in WWI. Leaving (with their money intact) for England in 1919, the family had continued to thrive. George, who's stepmother was the famous Dior model Jean Dawnay, had been to Oxford, trained as a print-maker and become an art director in the film business. He was also an artist and introduced Mirren to a commune in which he was living at a house called Parsenn Sally on Ditchford Farm, at Holford, just outside Stratford. Many artists would live and work here; there'd also be a recording studio they'd hire out to bands. Mirren would hold her 28th birthday party here, and often drive over in her battered old Saab, sometimes babysitting the neighbours' kids with Galitzine. Wild parties would be held, with guests dressing as Marvel comic characters. The men would love to dress in drag, the women as nuns and tarts. There'd be vast amounts of wine consumed and marijuana smoked. Mirren would admit to taking her first and only acid trip here. She'd also, she'd say, steer mostly clear of pot as she was working hard and needed to maintain a clear head.
Come 1974, the house's owner Dave Verney (actually Baron Willoughby de Broke) would move the commune down to Surrendell Farm at Hullavington, in the Wiltshire countryside near Chippenham. This would be a ramshackle Jacobean farmhouse set in 57 acres, run by Vereny and artists Sarah Ponsonby and John Rendell. It would be run as a collective, with all residents and visitors, including Galitzine and Mirren, helping with renovations and the rearing of livestock. One neighbour who'd often pop round was Diane Cilento, recently divorced from Sean Connery. More finance would be raised from a restaurant they'd open in nearby Bath, called Parsenn Sally in memory of the earlier commune. Mirren, an enthusiastic participant, would once shock the diners here by working as a cocktail waitress.
Eventually, the commune would be broken by the press attention when Roddy Llewellyn, the 25-year-old artists and chief gardener began an affair with the 43-year-old Princess Margaret, still married to Lord Snowdon. Later hundreds of cannabis plants would be found there and it was all over.
By the end of the Seventies, Helen was an established superstar of the stage, famous and infamous both. Her efforts as Queen Margaret in Henry VI (1977), Isabella in Measure For Measure (1979), as Grace in Brian Friel's Faith Healer (1981), Moll Cutpurse in The Roaring Girl (1983), and in the title role of The Duchess Of Malfi - convincingly courageous in the face of love and death,and once again conducting an affair with an underling - would further cement her searing rep. In her private life she'd be seeing the successful fashion photographer James Wedge, teaching him gardening at his cottage in the Forest of Dean. But her infamy - oh, the dirty harlot! - was about to take prominence. First came the notorious Caligula. Penthouse boss Bob Guccione co-produced it and brought in Tinto Brass to direct, Brass having earlier created the long-banned Salon Kitty, wherein Nazis made the absolute most of a brothel. The critics said it was pornographic, Brass said it was a serious essay on fascism and decadence. Guccione liked the essay part. He wanted sex, but he wanted seriousness too - Caligula was to be a proper epic. So the finest actors were approached and, having seen the script, signed up. John Gielgud, Peter O’Toole, Malcolm McDowell (Helen’s co-star in O Lucky Man!), and Helen herself. Gore Vidal was in as writer. It simply had to be a classic, didn't it?
Then, famously, it all went mental. Caligula was one loopy guy, unfortunately blessed with all the wealth and power of the Roman Empire. His excesses were legendary. He slaughtered his rivals and anyone who mildly annoyed him. He slept with his horse, his sister, and probably his horse’s sister too. He took countless lovers and enforced the Emperor’s right to “take” brides on their wedding night. And Brass, capturing it all in gaudy colour, squeezed it all in (as well as some absurd lesbian sequences), making Caligula near-unreleasable. Indeed, Guccione didn’t really want to release it, and the film was messed about with for ages before it actually saw the light of day. All the performances were notable, especially Helen as Caligula’s knowing, voluptuous mistress Caesonia, but all were overshadowed by the silly sex and incredible brutality. Children were swung by the legs onto stone steps: sleeping guards were filled with wine via a funnel then “popped” with a sword in the stomach: men were buried up to their necks and beheaded by mighty, stadium-sized threshing machines - amazing!
The furore was worldwide, but Mirren continued to provoke and entertain with a string of tremendous performances.
In The Long Good Friday, she played the partner of Bob Hoskins’ gangster boss as he followed in the footsteps of Scarface, London-style, her face a picture of yearning when his treacherous lieutenant told her he wanted to “lick every inch of you”. She'd fight hard, with Hoskins' support, to have her character fleshed out. Next, she was back in the London underworld in Hussy, as a prostitute seeking love and redemption and finding only violence and despair. Then she made a literally fabulous Morgana in John Boorman’s excellent Excalibur (“A -NALL NATH-RACH!”), seducing Arthur, enticing Merlin, succouring Mordred. She was wild and really, really free, as if preparing for the role of Cleopatra that she would play onstage again the following year. Women in particular remember Mirren’s Morgana. She’s frivolous, deadly serious, curious, talented, intuitive and sexual, she’s demanding yet gives her whole life for love, she’s mystical (with her faerie blood) but she’s all-too-human. She’s a witch but, dammit, she’s a role model. Some of the energy she put into the role was engendered by anger and loathing, Boorman having cannily cast Nicol Williamson as Merlin - Mirren and Williamson having grown to detest each other during the run of Macbeth, seven years earlier.
But there was also fun to be found on set in Ireland. Liam Neeson would later explain how, as a struggling young actor, he'd enjoyed the pub sessions frequented by the cast and crew, as had Mirren. Unsurprisingly, he admired Mirren tremendously and was delighted when he noticed her comically aping his style of walking - something he'd read she did when she fancied someone. She did indeed fancy him, and she'd take her hulking toy-boy back to London with her, introducing him to the cream of thespian talent and thereby launching his career.
After Excalibur came Priest Of Love, about the final years of DH Lawrence, another modern-day sexual revolutionary. And there was Cal, where Mirren shone (and shocked) as a widow in Ireland, who has an affair with a young boy - a boy, as it happens, involved in the killing of her husband. This role brought her first major award - Best Actress at Cannes.
Cal led to a (sort of) return to her roots as Russian cosmonaut Tanya Kirbuk in Stanley Kubrick’s 2010, then she was Russian again in what was, in some respects, her most important role. In White Nights she played the lover of dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov but, as time progressed, she became the real-life lover of director Taylor Hackford, then on a high after An Officer And A Gentleman and Against All Odds (he’d go on to direct The Devil’s Advocate, Proof Of Life and the Oscar-winning Ray). Mirren would later explain that, living in Parson's Green with two friends, she'd gone to LA for 2010, liked it and decided to stay awhile, looking for work.
Called up to meet Hackford at his office, she'd become impatient at his lateness and, after 20 minutes rose to leave, the insult being too much to bear. Just as she was leaving, he arrived, and her life was changed. Flitting between homes in Los Angeles, New Orleans, London and the south of France, the couple would remain boyfriend-girlfriend until New Year’s Eve, 1997, when they got married at Ardersier Parish Church, in Scotland, Mirren thus becoming stepmother to Hackford's sons, Rio and Alex.
Splitting her time between stage and screen, Helen continued to seek out challenging roles, often roles smacking of sexual liberation. There was more DH Lawrence with Coming Through, when she played the writer’s married lover Frieda von Richtofer. Next she played Harrison Ford’s wife in The Mosquito Coast, taken, along with son River Phoenix, to live in a rainforest. She claimed, notoriously, that poor Harrison was a bad kisser. Then came more excellence, alongside her old RSC cohort Ben Kingsley in Pascali’s Island, and more controversy with The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover. Here, as the girlfriend of repulsive gangster Michael Gambon (her RSC Antony), she exhibited boundless zeal in coupling with Alan Howard (her RSC Hamlet) in the kitchen, in the toilet, in the back of a meat van, wherever.
Having returned to the stage to play the prostitute opposite Bob Peck's detective in Arthur Miller's Two-Way Mirror, onscreen she'd join another thespian great, Paul Schofield, in the mystic environmentalist piece When The Whales Came. There'd be more Russian-ness in the assassination drama Red King, White Knight, then she'd back Donald Sutherland's titular medical revolutionary in Dr Bethune.
And now, as predicted by that Indian hand-reader, her career began to peak. As Detective Jane Tennison in Lynda La Plante’s Prime Suspect, she was superb. Vulnerable, officious and confused, yet smart, cool, tolerant, ambitious and absolutely on the ball, she fought hard to succeed in a world dominated by men jealously guarding their territory. Prime Suspect would become a franchise and, between 1990 and 2006 would win Helen a raft of Emmy nominations (including one win), a Golden Globe nomination and several BAFTAs.
But this wasn't her only success. She was fabulously menacing alongside a deranged Christopher Walken as they terrorised young couple Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson in Ian McEwan's The Comfort Of Strangers: she was fine as the frustrated widow inappropriately marrying a 21-year-old Italian in the EM Forster period piece Where Angels Fear To Tread: then she was impressive as the depressed housewife coming to suspect her husband is a serial killer in The Hawk.
In Prince Of Jutland, a gritty re-examining of the Hamlet legend, she'd mourn the death of husband Tom Wilkinson and suffer both the insanity of her son Christian Bale and the sexual attentions of killer Gabriel Byrne, then she'd hit the heights as Queen Charlotte (Mrs King), as she struggled to understand Nigel Hawthorne’s illness in The Madness Of King George, for which she was Oscar-nominated (she lost to Dianne Wiest in Bullets Over Broadway) and named Best Actress at Cannes once again.
And there was more. Returning to the stage, Mirren was so good as Natalya Petrovna in the West End production of Turgenev’s A Month In The Country (yet more Russian-ness) that it led to a 1995 Broadway debut that won her a Tony nomination. Onscreen, she'd undergo more torment as an apolitical teacher whose IRA member son goes on hunger strike in Some Mother's Son. Next would come Losing Chase, Kevin Bacon's directorial debut, where Mirren, recovering from a mental breakdown on Martha's Vineyard, would gradually form an emotional bond with her helper, Bacon's real-life wife Kyra Sedgwick, the performance winning Mirren a Golden Globe. Following this would be TV miniseries Painted Lady where she'd be a down-and-out blues singer drawn into the ugly world of illegal art dealing and suddenly involved in robbery, murder and an affair with a hugely dangerous Franco Nero.
Having failed to rescue Sidney Lumet's dodgy hospital-set black comedy Critical Care, Mirren would triumph once again onstage, playing Cleopatra for the third time and blowing poor Alan Rickman off the stage (she even intimidated Cedric, the Californian snake playing her asp, who crept away into the stalls, never to return). Then she'd be a harridan of a tutor, torturing poor Katie Holmes and receiving a sadistic come-uppance in Kevin Williamson’s Teaching Mrs Tingle. And there'd be more glory with The Passion Of Ayn Rand where she'd win another Emmy for her portrayal of the powerful, sexually-liberated (and Russian) author of The Fountainhead, puffed up by success and breaking hearts and conventions by taking up with student Eric Stoltz.
Having directed a segment of Happy Birthday (the other directors being Anne Heche and Mary Stuart Masterson), she'd return to the UK to play a famous TV gardener who sponsors mopey jailbird Clive Owen as he enters a big-time flower-show. Then she'd up the emotional ante in Sean Penn’s The Pledge as the therapist digging in to Jack Nicholson's obsession with the unsolved murder of a little girl.
Mirren would return to the stage in 2000, playing in Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus Descending at London’s Donmar Warehouse, a reunion with her Madness Of King George director, Nicholas Hytner. Here she was Lady Torrance, a small-town shopkeeper in a loveless marriage whose dreams of liberation lead her to disaster when she embarks on an affair with young drifter Val Xavier, played by upcoming sex symbol Stuart Townsend.
(Having been seduced by a far-older James Mason in her first film proper, in later years Mirren has surely played "the older woman" far more than any other actress). She'd be Oliver-nominated for her efforts. A year later there'd be more stage success in America, alongside Ian McKellen in Strindberg's Dance Of Death. Though it was in production as the terrible events of September 11th took place, events which killed many a New York production, Dance Of Death would be a screaming hit, giving Mirren her second Tony nomination.
Onscreen, Mirren would now revisit her old East End stomping ground, along with Michael Caine, Ray Winstone et al in Last Orders. Then, as if to prove that hand-reader wrong, her star continued to rise as she passed into her mid-fifties with Robert Altman’s Gosford Park. As housekeeper Mrs Wilson, she was right at the centre of an English country manor bedevilled with murder and intrigue and suffering the evil effects of years of sexual subjugation by the lord and master Sir William McCordle. Interestingly, Helen’s own mother only narrowly avoided a life in service. It was yet another stand-out performance from a woman who, it seems, will not let up till her sisters are free. She was quite rightly nominated for the Oscar.
After this came Hal Hartley’s No Such Thing, a kind of Beauty And The Beast-type affair, where a young journalist comes across a mythical beast while seeking her lost fiance in Iceland, Helen playing a cruel and exploitative network boss. Here she joined another strong female cast including Sarah Polley and Julie Christie. Then came William H. Macy’s Door To Door, the true story of a man who, despite suffering from cerebral palsy, managed to make a living selling double-strength vanilla extract for four decades. Helen played Macy’s devoted mother (amazing as she was in actuality 56 and he 52), a font of inspiration and latterly battling Alzheimer’s. She’d follow this with Georgetown where she played a Washington hostess who’s forced to reinvent herself as a businesswoman and battle her own children when her husband leaves her a controlling interest in a newspaper. Then there was more Tennessee Williams with a lavish Showtime remake of The Roman Spring Of Mrs Stone, with Helen in the title role (originally played by Vivien Leigh) and Olivier Martinez as her Italian toy-boy. She’d be Emmy-nominated again for Roman Spring and Door To Door, the latter also seeing her up for a Golden Globe.
Still there was more. 2003 saw Mirren dominate the front-covers once more due to the mild controversy surrounding Brit flick Calendar Girls, which would bring her yet another Golden Globe nomination. This was based on the true tale of the Rylstone and District Women’s Institute who, in April 1999, published a calendar intended to raise money for a local hospital which had cared for the leukaemia-suffering husband of one of their number. As a twist, though, it was decided the calendar would feature photos of the women engaging in Women’s Institute activities - butt naked. Naturally, given that many of these ladies were getting on a bit, the calendar made worldwide headlines.
Calendar Girls would be another hit for Mirren who, as Chris Harper, played the driving force behind the idea (she also looked fantastic in her photo). It also saw her back in the press being questioned about - yes, you’ve guessed it - sex. And she was 58! And she'd just been made a Dame Of The British Empire! Now regularly winning decent Hollywood roles, she moved on to The Clearing, where she shared a perfect home with wealthy businessman Robert Redford. But just how perfect the set-up is is tested when Redford is kidnapped and held to ransom by a pissed-off Willem Dafoe. Mirren's taken aback by the blunt and intrusive police, then shocked when they find evidence of that Redford has been continuing an affair she thought over. She's a picture of restrained anger when she meets her rival and desperately tries to keep it together as Defoe demands she bring him the money. Indeed, much of the film's power stemmed from her reactions to her new situation and, finally, her awful predicament.
Next Mirren would step in to TV comedy, as Babette the kleptomaniac being the last ever guest caller on Frasier. Then would come Raising Helen, a Garry Marshall comedy where Kate Hudson, assistant to Helen at a modelling agency, must look after her sister's kids when she's killed. - Mirren naturally sacking her for her unprofessional behaviour. This would be followed by yet another outing as Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect 6 - by now among the most popular franchises in British TV history, with Helen continually voted one of the UK’s biggest (and sexiest) stars. She’d also join Kate Winslet in lending her voice to Pride, a high profile Simon Nye production part-animated by the Jim Henson Workshop. And there'd be a return to the stage as Christine Mannon in Mourning Becomes Elektra at the National, a deservedly Olivier-nominated performance.
In “real life” she attempted to make a difference too. She worked hard for ActionAid, fighting the trade in Asian sex slaves, and for Oxfam, battling for an end to arms sales to Africa, even addressing the United Nations in New York on the subject. She'd also campaign on behalf of children caught up in the Ugandan civil war. In the UK, she exhibited extraordinary un-luvvie-ness in interviewing Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London.
Work-wise, there'd be no let-up. Having popped up as the homeless, heroin-addicted mother of paramedic Cara Buono in an episode of TV drama Third Watch, she'd provide the voice of supercomputer Deep Thought in the cinema adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Unafraid of a joke at her own expense, she'd even appear in a short pastiche of one of her greatest filmic disaster, Caligula.
But most of Mirren's work continued to be either challenging, award-winning, or both. In Shadowboxer she and Cuba Gooding Jr played fellow assassins and lovers, their relationship darkened by Mirren's impending death from cancer. A neo-noir freak-out, it was arty and fascinating, too much for many, and in a way it was typical Mirren - her on-screen affair with Gooding purposefully subverting people's notions of age, race and sex.
Stepping back in time, she'd then return to TV to take the title role in the lavish Elizabeth I. Repelling the Spanish, Mary, Queen of Scots and all demands for a successor to the throne, she'd enjoy a long affair with Jeremy Irons' Dudley, then go after Irons' stepson, Essex, played by Hugh Dancy. It was a demanding role, perfect for Mirren, and she'd shine again when playing the second Queen Elizabeth in The Queen (given her aristocratic Russian background, the pair might actually be related). Directed by Stephen Frears, this would see Mirren play the monarch in the midst of the furore surrounding the death of Diana, trying to follow protocol and tradition while the country is demanding a wholly inappropriate state funeral. At first she's restrained, hiding her annoyance at efforts to break with royal protocol, then she's bewildered by the unending public hysteria. She's also shocked at being described as heartless, an accusation even implied by her own son, and she's further put out by Michael Sheen's overly chummy Tony Blair, her disapproval written all over her face. Beyond all this she'd be very human, trying to do her dignified best for all concerned, including a stag she encounters on the moors and shoos away from the approaching guns. The stag, she understands, is like her, an icon under threat, hunted down by his lessers. The look of wonder on her face as she gazes upon the creature was a wonder in itself. It was another brilliant performance, with Mirren taking the emotional repression she'd exhibited in Gosford Park and Prime Suspect to its painful limit.
Prime Suspect 7, where she sought the murderer of a pregnant 14-year-old while also struggling with alcoholism, the imminent death of her father and possible redundancy, must have come as light relief.
Come 2007, Mirren was being publicly lauded as one of the greats. She'd just won an Emmy for Elizabeth I. She'd won the Volpi Cup at Venice for The Queen. She was a treble Golden Globe nominee, for Elizabeth I, The Queen and Prime Suspect 7, winning for the first two. And then the Best Actress prizes for the Queen began to roll in, Mirren accepting them all with dignified delight. She won at the BAFTAs, in Boston, in Chicago, in Dallas, in Florida, in Kansas, in Las Vegas, in Los Angeles, in New York City, in Phoenix, in San Diego, in San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Toronto and Washington DC. At the Oscars of 2007 she was the hottest favourite in history, the bookies giving up and paying out before the ceremony even took place. And, of course, they were right, Mirren winning at the third time of asking.
Of course, she wouldn't stop there. Winning an Oscar for The Queen, she said, took the pressure off, allowing her to indulge in lighter material. Soon she was on our screens again, this time in Inkheart, Cornelia Funke's literary fantasy where a young girl's father discovers he can conjure characters from books. Trouble occurs when he draws a bad guy forth and his own wife is sucked into the novel, the bad guy later kidnapping him to secure his place in the real world. Thus the girl must rely on a gang of real and fictional friends - one being Mirren, playing her irascible book-collecting aunt Elinor, screaming around on her motorcycle - to seek out the titular Inkheart, the mysterious author of the novel concerned.
Come 2009, Mirren would find herself in State Of Play, the Hollywood adaptation of the BBC series. Here Russell Crowe would play an ace Washington reporter who begins to investigate a series of deaths he links to the shadowy PointCorp organisation, seemingly in league with the government. Mirren would appear as Crowe's editor, battling for the paper's integrity as she's ordered to cut costs and replace news with gossip. Next she could be seen in Racine's Phedre at the National Theatre's Lyttelton. Directed by Nicholas Hytner, she'd suffer tortures as she'd be crushed by passion for her own stepson, Dominic Cooper's Hippolytus. As part of the NT's Live project, the play would be filmed and broadcast live to some 70 cinemas on June 25th, later to be screened worldwide.
Mirren's next outing would be another important one. This was The Last Station where she'd return to her Russian roots to play Sofya, wife of Tolstoy. With Christopher Plummer as her famous author spouse, she battles interlopers and spies in her house, all trying to get Tolstoy to leave his literary legacy to the nation. Having born him 13 kids, Mirren knows her husband well, recognising his flaws but still loving him and, as she tries to protect him and herself, she's panicked, vicious, kind, manipulative and amusing. It was yet another powerful performance and would see her nominated for an Oscar (her fourth nomination) and a Golden Globe.
2010 would bring a welter of Mirren releases. First would come The Debt, based on Assaf Bernstein's 2007's movie Ha-Hov, where three young members of Mossad claim to have killed infamous Nazi war criminal the Surgeon of Birkenau and live off their fame for 30 years. Then a man appears in Ukraine saying he's that same, supposedly dead Nazi and the former agents - Mirren, Ciaran Hinds and Tom Wilkinson (Mirren's husband in Prince Of Jutland) must discover the truth and face the consequences. Following this there'd be Love Ranch, a rare opportunity to work with husband Taylor Hackford, where she and Joe Pesci would play a couple opening the first legal brothel in Nevada. Based on the true story of Joe and Sally Conforte and the Mustang Ranch they opened outside of Reno, this would see Pesci trying to outwit the authorities and Mirren running the show as the joint's madam.
After this would come a return to Blighty for a remake of Brighton Rock where Sam Riley would play young criminal Pinkie, involved in a death and believing he needs to marry or murder waitress Andrea Riseborough in order to escape the law. Mirren would play a brief acquaintance of the dead man, who involves the police in the affair and tries to save Riseborough. Next would come a return to Shakespeare with The Tempest, directed by Julie Taymor who'd earlier delivered a splendid version of Titus Andronicus. Here Mirren would take the lead as Prospera (usually Prospero, of course), a princess trapped on an island with her daughter Felicity Jones, as well as spirits Ariel and Caliban, played by Ben Whishaw and Djimon Hounsou. Drawing on magical powers, Mirren causes a shipwreck which bring characters from her past back into her life, ripe for revenge. Next would come the animated Australian production Guardians Of Ga'Hoole where she'd join such Antipodean greats as Geoffrey Rush, Sam Neill and Hugo Weaving in the tale of owls and totalitarianism. Then there'd be Red, another comic book adaptation, where former black ops agent Bruce Willis finds assassins are threatening his new life with Mary-Louise Parker. to survive, he must somehow reform his old team, featuring Mirren, Morgan Freeman and John Malkovich.
And next? Well, having played her in 1965 (her breakthrough), 1982 (roughing up Michael Gambon’s Antony) and 1998 (consuming Alan Rickman), dare Helen Mirren play the first pensionable Cleopatra? Will she continue to bare her body as she passes through her sixties, shocking us all as we realise we're still turned on? And will she continue to scrap it out with Dench, Smith, Rigg etc to see who’s the greatest of them all, snapping up the prizes as she goes? The answers are Probably, Hopefully and Definitely. And all this from a woman who describes herself as “famous for being cool about not being gorgeous”. In that opinion at least, she is utterly alone.Dominic Wills
And she’s an Essex girl. Kind of. Helen’s grandfather was Russian, Pyotr Vasielivich Mironov, an aristocrat connected to the military. The son of a countess and a senior military officer, he rose swiftly through the army's ranks. He came to London to buy arms to aid his countrymen in the Russo-Japanese war, living in luxury in the Russian embassy with his wife, Marusia and sending son Basil to a private school. He then founded himself stranded due to the Bolshevik revolution, leaving six sisters on the family estate at Gzhatsk, near Smolensk (Gzhatsk was in 1968 renamed Gagarin after cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, born in the nearby village of Klushino). During the revolution, the sisters would be forced to leave their home and live in a crammed flat in Moscow, the family losing their property and status forever and really only being saved from a sorry death by one of the sisters, Valentina, marrying a high-ranking communist official. Interestingly, given Helen's later career, Valentina would be a typist fro the great Stanislavsky. Forced to leave the Russia embassy and now jobless and homeless, Pyotr would take a job as a cab driver. The poverty and loss of status would take its toll, and he'd separate from Marusia in 1928.
And the family did have status. When, in later years, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Mirren and her sister Katherine did some research into their background, they found that they were descended from famed military dynasty the Kamenskys. Field Marshal Mikhail Kamensy had enjoyed success in the Russo-Turkish war of 1768-1774 and been awarded the Order of St George of the Second Class, the highest Russian military honour. In 1806 he'd be made Commander in Chief of the Russian army fighting Napoleon but, not up to the job, would be sacked the next year. Two years after that he'd be axed to death by a 15-year-old boy, the brother of one of Mikhail's young concubines. Mikhail's son Nikolay, meanwhile, was also a lauded general.
Having lost 1600 men at Austerlitz, he gained a reputation for risking men's lives, but also for great daring, and triumphed during the 1808 war against the Swedes and the Russo-Turkish war of 1806-1812. Risk-taking, sex and controversy clearly run in the family.
Helen's father Vasily, who’d been brought to London when only two, was something of a musician. A viola player with the London Philharmonic, he'd also work in a fabric warehouse in the East End, where he'd meet his future wife, Kathleen Rogers (known as Kat). She was a working class girl from West Ham and the youngest of fourteen kids, with perhaps a splash of gypsy blood. Her family were butchers by trade, indeed their claim to fame was that her granddad had been butcher to Queen Victoria. During the Second World War, Basil would not be permitted to join the army, instead driving an ambulance in the Blitzed East End. Later, as his family grew, he'd become a cabbie, like his father had. Later still he'd be a driving test examiner and then would achieve a bureaucratic post in the Minstry of Transport.
Vasily was fluent in Russian but wanted a clean break from the past, wanted his family to blend in to this strange society (he'd call himself Basil and anglicized their surname). In this he'd be aided by Helen's mother. Though the family would observe Russian Orthodox holidays and Helen and Katherine would be taught something of their roots, no Russian would be spoken in the house, the girls would be encouraged to fit in to their south-eastern surroundings.
This is the Essex connection. Before Helen was born, her parents moved out to Ilford where they both worked at a jacquard fabric shop. These were times of turmoil in the East End, even before the Blitz. Helen’s dad was often in fights with Oswald Mosley’s black shirts. A socialist with communist leanings (oddly, given what had happened to his own family), he would later watch in horror as, back home, Stalin turned the communist dream into a nightmare of secrecy, paranoia and murder.
Helen herself was born Ilyena Lydia Mironoff on the 27th of July, 1945, two months after the end of the war. She was born at Queen Charlotte's Maternity Hospital on Goldhawk Road, Hammersmith, originally an isolation unit for women suffering from puerperal fever but in 1940 combining with the Queen's Lying-In Hospital, which had been in Marylebone. The birth would last an amazingly sdhort 20 minutes. Katherine was older, by two years, and there'd be a younger brother, Peter, born in 1948. When Peter was born the family would move out to Westcliff-On-Sea, then on to Leigh-On-Sea, both part of Southend on the end of the Thames estuary. From the age of 6, Helen recalls wanting to be an actress. And not just any old actress. She wanted to act in an “old-fashioned and traditional sense”.
She performed onstage at school, making a debut as the Virgin Mary as Hamlet Court primary school in Westcliff, then at 8 was disappointed to be merely a blackbird, sitting resentfully in a giant pie in a production of Four And Twenty Blackbirds for an end-of-year show. She'd later attend St Bernard’s Convent High School for Girls in Westcliff, set up by Bernardine Sisters on Milton Road, and dreamt of being a Shakespearean heroine. She says she was obsessed with the Bard by the age of 13, having been drawn to him by the character of Joan Of Arc in Henry VI. “She was portrayed as the wicked witch,” she recalled later “I loved her for that”. Strangely, Helen was not a big fan of the movies - the stage was her thing.
Life at home was marked by lack of money but the Mirrens still maintained a middle-class Bohemian existence. Kit, who'd left school at 14, was constantly encouraging Kate and Helen to work hard, get qualifications, go to university, become economically independent of men. Kit certainly lived to her own beat, staying in bed till 10 and hoovering at one in the morning if she hoovered at all. She would, though, make all her kids clothes. Luxury for the kids would be a scoop of Rossi's ice cream in a glass of cherryade. As she moved through her teens, Helen would work as a blagger at Southend's Kursaal amusement park, urging people to go on the rides. In her spare time she'd hang out at a coffee-bar called The Shrubbery at 15, Royal Terrace near the sea-front (it's now a restaurant called The Terrace). There'd be no heavy dating as her strict Catholic parents did not approve, though she did go out with one Jean-Louis, A French kid in Southend to learn English. she'd also sleep with a self-portrait of her hero, Goya, under her pillow.
The Mirrens lifestyle was in sharp contrast to that of their relatives in England. Basil's sister, Olga, born in Britain, had made a good first marriage to a very wealthy car salesman. and had a daughter, Tania. Olga had then married East End criminal George Dawson. In the late Fifties, Tania (known as Tania Mallet) would become a famous model and, four years older than Helen, would beat her into films, in 1964 playing Tilly Masterson in Goldfinger, trying to take revenge on Goldfinger for the death of her sister Shirley Eaton, famously found coated in gold. It would be Tania's only appearance as she'd prefer to concentrate on modelling. With Olga rich, Tania famous and George an underworld name, they'd lead glamorous lives in hotels and aboard yachts, and they'd splash the cash when they came to visit, Kat receiving expensive perfume. Seeing her cousin's success in the big leagues, Helen's own ambitions can only have been boosted.
Her parents did not think acting to be a prudent career-choice. They encouraged their daughter to enrol at teacher training college, which she dutifully did, winning a scholarship to the New College Of Speech and Drama on North End Road in Hampstead.
This had been very recently set up, in 1962, by senior staff at the speech and drama department of the Royal Academy of Music. there'd been no free space at the Academy, so they'd set it up on north end Road, in the former home of ballerina Anna Pavlova who'd lived there between 1912 and 1931. The school would provide three year courses for teachers, instructing them in all aspects of stagecraft. Before taking up this new position, Helen had already auditioned for and won a place at the National Youth Theatre. Things were looking good.
In September of 1963 she'd appear at the Scala in the NYT production of Hamlet. Simon Ward would play the lead, with Mirren playing a handmaiden to Nicola Jenkins' Ophelia. For the next two years she'd study at Hampstead and perform with the NYT, still being convinced that the steadier future option would be a career in teaching. However, this would change in September, 1965, when she was given the female lead in Antony And Cleopatra. At the Old Vic she was immediately sensational. Her Cleopatra (a role to which she would periodically return) was a revelation. Commanding, capricious, wise, and demanding, she was also overtly sexual, a quality deemed utterly contemporary, given the sexual revolution taking place at the time. Theatre needs to stay on the ball as much as any other medium.
Now 20 and with her performance as Cleopatra having won her an agent, Maggie Parker, Mirren was on the up. The reaction to her Cleopatra had convinced her that her future lay in acting, as she'd hoped, not teaching. In her personal life, too, she was thriving. Having been kept away from boys while in Southend, when she'd arrived in London she'd spread her wings somewhat and been hurt badly. Now she was in a relationship, her first decent relationship, with fellow actor Kenneth Cranham. Cranham was also a member of the NYT and then moved on to RADA. Sharing love and poverty, they'd go to restaurants and both pick at the same plate.. Mirren would later recall going with Cranham to Leicester Square to see one of the Cassius Clay - Sonny Liston fights on the big screen. In the West End they'd marvel at performances by Laurence Olivier, Joan Plowright, Maggie Smith, Frank Finlay, Geraldine McEwan, soaking it all in. When Cranham left RADA and scored his first professional job in the West End, he and Mirren would visit a posh Chinese restaurant and revel in the ordering of more than one dish.
Following her stint at the NYT, Mirren would move out into the provinces to experience the rep scene. Her first professional engagement would come in 1966 with the Century Theatre group's adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night at Manchester's University Theatre. This would be directed by group founder Braham Murray, who'd go on to found the Royal Exchange Theatre Company, and feature Dily Hamlett and Derek Fowlds, later to find fame on TV in Yes, Minister. Mirren would stay with the Century Theatre for a year or so, also appearing in their Merchant Of Venice, alongside James Maxwell. By 1967, though, she'd been snapped up by the Royal Shakespeare Company.
After making her debut in Coriolanus (starring Ian Richardson and Jeffery Dench, older brother of Judi), in many of her early appearances she'd share the stage with other RSC newcomers Patrick Stewart and Ben Kingsley, as well as the more experienced likes of Alan Howard, Norman Rodway and Janet Suzman. Also in 1967 she'd play Castiza in The Revenger's Tragedy and jilted widow's daughter Diana in All's Well That Ends Well, while 1968 would see her as the pastoral Phebe in As You Like It, Trojan beauty Cressida in Troilus And Cressida and put-upon lover Hero in Much Ado About Nothing. In 1969 the RSC would move her away from Shakespeare, casting her as Win-The-Fight Littlewit in Ben Jonson's earthy Bartholomew Fair and as Susie Monican in Sean O'Casey's The Silver Tassie, but she'd be back with the Bard the next year, as the tragic Ophelia in Hamlet, the bereaved and seduced Lady Anne in Richard III, and as Julia in Two Gentlemen Of Verona, disguising herself as a boy to win back her unfaithful lover, Proteus. Her initial run with the RSC would end in 1971, once she'd played Tatiana in Gorky's Enemies, Harriet in Etherege's Restoration comedy The Man Of Mode, Elyane in Genet's The Balcony and the title role in Miss Julie, the latter performance being committed to film and released the next year. It had been tough work throughout, with Mirren often rehearsing one play in the morning, acting in another in the afternoon and in yet another in the evening.
No overview of Mirren’s career would be complete without at least a brief discussion of the Sex Question. Many have noted the number of “sexual” roles she’s played, the number of times she’s appeared naked onstage and onscreen. Actually, she was well-known for it from her very first “proper” screen role, in 1969, and, despite her early experience with the Royal Shakespeare Company being almost entirely classical, she still became known as "the sex queen of the RSC". Indeed, her first ever film role, seldom seen, would have her hilariously sending up the use of sex by the advertising industry. This was in Don Levy's 1967 masterwork Herostratus, an extraordinary film which saw Michael Gothard as a young poet who's so disillusioned by the world that he decides to kill himself.
In order to turn his death into a statement, he hires an advertising agent who unfortunately turns the whole notion on its head so Gothard looks like an attention-seeking fool. Mirren would appear briefly in an advert being filmed. First covered by a pink wrap, she's quickly shrugs it off to reveal a skimpy purple bodice. Her first words onscreen are "Do you want me?" before she comically explains what the viewer will have to get for her - not horses or Cadillacs or even a snakeskin parasol (with two knobs!), but a pair of the orange rubber gloves she's there to flog. Blonde and remorselessly sexy, she's coy, seductive and laughably forward, caressing her legs and heavily promoting her breasts. The sequence ends with Mirren being thrusting screaming over a man's shoulder and carried through the cameras and crew. It was a classic debut, knowing and really funny.
But to view Mirren as ever having been a mere sex kitten is a mistake. As said, she arrived on the scene at the height of the sexual revolution, when women, empowered by the Pill and a liberalization of attitudes, were at last experimenting with freedom and power. Mirren’s performances were a reflection of this and also a catalyst for further change. Where earlier actresses had to find other ways to portray desire and vulnerability in all their nakedness, the times allowed Mirren more scope, and she took it.
This is not to say that Helen overly concentrated on her characters’ sexuality, she didn’t. But sexuality is a prime mover in most matters, and she showed it. Indeed, she showed everything - rage, dignity, jealousy, playfulness, madness, sorrow, steadfastness. The sexual aspect just added to (and helped explain) the hugely satisfying complexity of her performances. One critic said she was “too intelligent to be easily typecast as a temptress” and it was generally agreed that her combination of physicality and cerebral command was transforming women’s roles. Her nudity was controversial, of course, but more importantly, wherever she went, the debate over female empowerment and sexual justice raged. Of the Lady Macbeth she delivered opposite Nicol Williamson on a brief return to the RSC in 1974 it was written “It would be mere male chauvinism to deny that Miss Mirren plays everyone else off the stage”. She was a sexual pioneer, and as such she suffered the smutty comments of those whose seedy attitudes she sought to alter.
Onscreen, due to her concentration on the stage work, Mirren's career would not really take off until the very late 1970s. She'd played Hermia to Judi Dench’s Titania in Peter Hall’s filmed production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Then, in ’69, came her screen debut proper in Age Of Consent. Famed director Michael Powell had caught on to her sexiness and charisma and cast her as Cora Ryan, a young girl who re-inspires jaded artist James Mason on an island in the Great Barrier Reef. Mirren's precocious performance and the 40-year age-gap between the lovers would cause a mild sensation - adding, of course, to Mirren's fast-growing reputation.
The Seventies saw Mirren experimenting like crazy, seriously pushing back the envelope. Onscreen, she was impressive in Balzac’s Cousin Bette and in that filming of Strindberg’s Miss Julie, playing a noblewoman who engages in inappropriate and thoroughly damaging congress with a servant. More controversial still were Ken Russell’s Savage Messiah, about the young French sculptor Henri Gaudier, and Lindsay Anderson’s surreal anti-corporate comedy O Lucky Man!
It wasn’t all plain sailing. At one point, in her early twenties, she’s said, she got so “depressed and f***ed up” she visited an Indian hand-reader. She'd been crying constantly and had developed a form of OCD, being unable to walk down the middle of the pavement or touch metal. He told her that her success would not peak till her late forties. It had been a calming thought and quite liberating, allowing her to take risks without worry. In 1972 she joined Peter Brook’s International Centre of Theatre Research, touring in Africa and America. In Africa, the troupe would perform for and exchange stories with far-flung tribes, learning and teaching as they went. In America, they approached the Native Americans in the same way. Helen also received a permanent reminder of her visit. On an Indian reservation in Minnesota, drunk on brandy, she had an Indian symbol tattooed between the thumb and forefinger of her left hand. The symbol meant Equality - which is what she stands for most of all. “I haven’t had it removed”, she’s said “because it’s a reminder that I was sometimes a bad girl in the past”. Fans play a game where they try to spot the tattoo in Helen’s movies - often it’s covered up, but not always.
Helen was now coming into her own. Onstage there was that classic Lady Macbeth. She was excellent as the alcoholic rock singer in David Hare's Teeth 'n' Smiles at the Royal Court, brilliant as an over-sexed Nina in The Seagull. That same year, 1975, she'd be Ella in The Bed Before Yesterday at the Lyric, Hammersmith, a comedy of sexual manners written by the 90-year-old Ben Travers, who’d penned many of the classic Aldwych farces of the Twenties. Like The Seagull, it was directed by her O Lucky Man! helmsman, Lindsay Anderson.
Mirren would also, where she could, enjoy a contemporary Bohemian lifestyle. When back at the RSC for Macbeth she'd be dating George Galitzine, actually Prince George Rudolf Galitzine, also from an aristocratic Russian family, indeed a direct descendant of Catherine the Great. His grandfather, Vladimir, had been aide de camp to Grand Duke Nikolai Nikoleavich, commander of the Russian army in WWI. Leaving (with their money intact) for England in 1919, the family had continued to thrive. George, who's stepmother was the famous Dior model Jean Dawnay, had been to Oxford, trained as a print-maker and become an art director in the film business. He was also an artist and introduced Mirren to a commune in which he was living at a house called Parsenn Sally on Ditchford Farm, at Holford, just outside Stratford. Many artists would live and work here; there'd also be a recording studio they'd hire out to bands. Mirren would hold her 28th birthday party here, and often drive over in her battered old Saab, sometimes babysitting the neighbours' kids with Galitzine. Wild parties would be held, with guests dressing as Marvel comic characters. The men would love to dress in drag, the women as nuns and tarts. There'd be vast amounts of wine consumed and marijuana smoked. Mirren would admit to taking her first and only acid trip here. She'd also, she'd say, steer mostly clear of pot as she was working hard and needed to maintain a clear head.
Come 1974, the house's owner Dave Verney (actually Baron Willoughby de Broke) would move the commune down to Surrendell Farm at Hullavington, in the Wiltshire countryside near Chippenham. This would be a ramshackle Jacobean farmhouse set in 57 acres, run by Vereny and artists Sarah Ponsonby and John Rendell. It would be run as a collective, with all residents and visitors, including Galitzine and Mirren, helping with renovations and the rearing of livestock. One neighbour who'd often pop round was Diane Cilento, recently divorced from Sean Connery. More finance would be raised from a restaurant they'd open in nearby Bath, called Parsenn Sally in memory of the earlier commune. Mirren, an enthusiastic participant, would once shock the diners here by working as a cocktail waitress.
Eventually, the commune would be broken by the press attention when Roddy Llewellyn, the 25-year-old artists and chief gardener began an affair with the 43-year-old Princess Margaret, still married to Lord Snowdon. Later hundreds of cannabis plants would be found there and it was all over.
By the end of the Seventies, Helen was an established superstar of the stage, famous and infamous both. Her efforts as Queen Margaret in Henry VI (1977), Isabella in Measure For Measure (1979), as Grace in Brian Friel's Faith Healer (1981), Moll Cutpurse in The Roaring Girl (1983), and in the title role of The Duchess Of Malfi - convincingly courageous in the face of love and death,and once again conducting an affair with an underling - would further cement her searing rep. In her private life she'd be seeing the successful fashion photographer James Wedge, teaching him gardening at his cottage in the Forest of Dean. But her infamy - oh, the dirty harlot! - was about to take prominence. First came the notorious Caligula. Penthouse boss Bob Guccione co-produced it and brought in Tinto Brass to direct, Brass having earlier created the long-banned Salon Kitty, wherein Nazis made the absolute most of a brothel. The critics said it was pornographic, Brass said it was a serious essay on fascism and decadence. Guccione liked the essay part. He wanted sex, but he wanted seriousness too - Caligula was to be a proper epic. So the finest actors were approached and, having seen the script, signed up. John Gielgud, Peter O’Toole, Malcolm McDowell (Helen’s co-star in O Lucky Man!), and Helen herself. Gore Vidal was in as writer. It simply had to be a classic, didn't it?
Then, famously, it all went mental. Caligula was one loopy guy, unfortunately blessed with all the wealth and power of the Roman Empire. His excesses were legendary. He slaughtered his rivals and anyone who mildly annoyed him. He slept with his horse, his sister, and probably his horse’s sister too. He took countless lovers and enforced the Emperor’s right to “take” brides on their wedding night. And Brass, capturing it all in gaudy colour, squeezed it all in (as well as some absurd lesbian sequences), making Caligula near-unreleasable. Indeed, Guccione didn’t really want to release it, and the film was messed about with for ages before it actually saw the light of day. All the performances were notable, especially Helen as Caligula’s knowing, voluptuous mistress Caesonia, but all were overshadowed by the silly sex and incredible brutality. Children were swung by the legs onto stone steps: sleeping guards were filled with wine via a funnel then “popped” with a sword in the stomach: men were buried up to their necks and beheaded by mighty, stadium-sized threshing machines - amazing!
The furore was worldwide, but Mirren continued to provoke and entertain with a string of tremendous performances.
In The Long Good Friday, she played the partner of Bob Hoskins’ gangster boss as he followed in the footsteps of Scarface, London-style, her face a picture of yearning when his treacherous lieutenant told her he wanted to “lick every inch of you”. She'd fight hard, with Hoskins' support, to have her character fleshed out. Next, she was back in the London underworld in Hussy, as a prostitute seeking love and redemption and finding only violence and despair. Then she made a literally fabulous Morgana in John Boorman’s excellent Excalibur (“A -NALL NATH-RACH!”), seducing Arthur, enticing Merlin, succouring Mordred. She was wild and really, really free, as if preparing for the role of Cleopatra that she would play onstage again the following year. Women in particular remember Mirren’s Morgana. She’s frivolous, deadly serious, curious, talented, intuitive and sexual, she’s demanding yet gives her whole life for love, she’s mystical (with her faerie blood) but she’s all-too-human. She’s a witch but, dammit, she’s a role model. Some of the energy she put into the role was engendered by anger and loathing, Boorman having cannily cast Nicol Williamson as Merlin - Mirren and Williamson having grown to detest each other during the run of Macbeth, seven years earlier.
But there was also fun to be found on set in Ireland. Liam Neeson would later explain how, as a struggling young actor, he'd enjoyed the pub sessions frequented by the cast and crew, as had Mirren. Unsurprisingly, he admired Mirren tremendously and was delighted when he noticed her comically aping his style of walking - something he'd read she did when she fancied someone. She did indeed fancy him, and she'd take her hulking toy-boy back to London with her, introducing him to the cream of thespian talent and thereby launching his career.
After Excalibur came Priest Of Love, about the final years of DH Lawrence, another modern-day sexual revolutionary. And there was Cal, where Mirren shone (and shocked) as a widow in Ireland, who has an affair with a young boy - a boy, as it happens, involved in the killing of her husband. This role brought her first major award - Best Actress at Cannes.
Cal led to a (sort of) return to her roots as Russian cosmonaut Tanya Kirbuk in Stanley Kubrick’s 2010, then she was Russian again in what was, in some respects, her most important role. In White Nights she played the lover of dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov but, as time progressed, she became the real-life lover of director Taylor Hackford, then on a high after An Officer And A Gentleman and Against All Odds (he’d go on to direct The Devil’s Advocate, Proof Of Life and the Oscar-winning Ray). Mirren would later explain that, living in Parson's Green with two friends, she'd gone to LA for 2010, liked it and decided to stay awhile, looking for work.
Called up to meet Hackford at his office, she'd become impatient at his lateness and, after 20 minutes rose to leave, the insult being too much to bear. Just as she was leaving, he arrived, and her life was changed. Flitting between homes in Los Angeles, New Orleans, London and the south of France, the couple would remain boyfriend-girlfriend until New Year’s Eve, 1997, when they got married at Ardersier Parish Church, in Scotland, Mirren thus becoming stepmother to Hackford's sons, Rio and Alex.
Splitting her time between stage and screen, Helen continued to seek out challenging roles, often roles smacking of sexual liberation. There was more DH Lawrence with Coming Through, when she played the writer’s married lover Frieda von Richtofer. Next she played Harrison Ford’s wife in The Mosquito Coast, taken, along with son River Phoenix, to live in a rainforest. She claimed, notoriously, that poor Harrison was a bad kisser. Then came more excellence, alongside her old RSC cohort Ben Kingsley in Pascali’s Island, and more controversy with The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover. Here, as the girlfriend of repulsive gangster Michael Gambon (her RSC Antony), she exhibited boundless zeal in coupling with Alan Howard (her RSC Hamlet) in the kitchen, in the toilet, in the back of a meat van, wherever.
Having returned to the stage to play the prostitute opposite Bob Peck's detective in Arthur Miller's Two-Way Mirror, onscreen she'd join another thespian great, Paul Schofield, in the mystic environmentalist piece When The Whales Came. There'd be more Russian-ness in the assassination drama Red King, White Knight, then she'd back Donald Sutherland's titular medical revolutionary in Dr Bethune.
And now, as predicted by that Indian hand-reader, her career began to peak. As Detective Jane Tennison in Lynda La Plante’s Prime Suspect, she was superb. Vulnerable, officious and confused, yet smart, cool, tolerant, ambitious and absolutely on the ball, she fought hard to succeed in a world dominated by men jealously guarding their territory. Prime Suspect would become a franchise and, between 1990 and 2006 would win Helen a raft of Emmy nominations (including one win), a Golden Globe nomination and several BAFTAs.
But this wasn't her only success. She was fabulously menacing alongside a deranged Christopher Walken as they terrorised young couple Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson in Ian McEwan's The Comfort Of Strangers: she was fine as the frustrated widow inappropriately marrying a 21-year-old Italian in the EM Forster period piece Where Angels Fear To Tread: then she was impressive as the depressed housewife coming to suspect her husband is a serial killer in The Hawk.
In Prince Of Jutland, a gritty re-examining of the Hamlet legend, she'd mourn the death of husband Tom Wilkinson and suffer both the insanity of her son Christian Bale and the sexual attentions of killer Gabriel Byrne, then she'd hit the heights as Queen Charlotte (Mrs King), as she struggled to understand Nigel Hawthorne’s illness in The Madness Of King George, for which she was Oscar-nominated (she lost to Dianne Wiest in Bullets Over Broadway) and named Best Actress at Cannes once again.
And there was more. Returning to the stage, Mirren was so good as Natalya Petrovna in the West End production of Turgenev’s A Month In The Country (yet more Russian-ness) that it led to a 1995 Broadway debut that won her a Tony nomination. Onscreen, she'd undergo more torment as an apolitical teacher whose IRA member son goes on hunger strike in Some Mother's Son. Next would come Losing Chase, Kevin Bacon's directorial debut, where Mirren, recovering from a mental breakdown on Martha's Vineyard, would gradually form an emotional bond with her helper, Bacon's real-life wife Kyra Sedgwick, the performance winning Mirren a Golden Globe. Following this would be TV miniseries Painted Lady where she'd be a down-and-out blues singer drawn into the ugly world of illegal art dealing and suddenly involved in robbery, murder and an affair with a hugely dangerous Franco Nero.
Having failed to rescue Sidney Lumet's dodgy hospital-set black comedy Critical Care, Mirren would triumph once again onstage, playing Cleopatra for the third time and blowing poor Alan Rickman off the stage (she even intimidated Cedric, the Californian snake playing her asp, who crept away into the stalls, never to return). Then she'd be a harridan of a tutor, torturing poor Katie Holmes and receiving a sadistic come-uppance in Kevin Williamson’s Teaching Mrs Tingle. And there'd be more glory with The Passion Of Ayn Rand where she'd win another Emmy for her portrayal of the powerful, sexually-liberated (and Russian) author of The Fountainhead, puffed up by success and breaking hearts and conventions by taking up with student Eric Stoltz.
Having directed a segment of Happy Birthday (the other directors being Anne Heche and Mary Stuart Masterson), she'd return to the UK to play a famous TV gardener who sponsors mopey jailbird Clive Owen as he enters a big-time flower-show. Then she'd up the emotional ante in Sean Penn’s The Pledge as the therapist digging in to Jack Nicholson's obsession with the unsolved murder of a little girl.
Mirren would return to the stage in 2000, playing in Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus Descending at London’s Donmar Warehouse, a reunion with her Madness Of King George director, Nicholas Hytner. Here she was Lady Torrance, a small-town shopkeeper in a loveless marriage whose dreams of liberation lead her to disaster when she embarks on an affair with young drifter Val Xavier, played by upcoming sex symbol Stuart Townsend.
(Having been seduced by a far-older James Mason in her first film proper, in later years Mirren has surely played "the older woman" far more than any other actress). She'd be Oliver-nominated for her efforts. A year later there'd be more stage success in America, alongside Ian McKellen in Strindberg's Dance Of Death. Though it was in production as the terrible events of September 11th took place, events which killed many a New York production, Dance Of Death would be a screaming hit, giving Mirren her second Tony nomination.
Onscreen, Mirren would now revisit her old East End stomping ground, along with Michael Caine, Ray Winstone et al in Last Orders. Then, as if to prove that hand-reader wrong, her star continued to rise as she passed into her mid-fifties with Robert Altman’s Gosford Park. As housekeeper Mrs Wilson, she was right at the centre of an English country manor bedevilled with murder and intrigue and suffering the evil effects of years of sexual subjugation by the lord and master Sir William McCordle. Interestingly, Helen’s own mother only narrowly avoided a life in service. It was yet another stand-out performance from a woman who, it seems, will not let up till her sisters are free. She was quite rightly nominated for the Oscar.
After this came Hal Hartley’s No Such Thing, a kind of Beauty And The Beast-type affair, where a young journalist comes across a mythical beast while seeking her lost fiance in Iceland, Helen playing a cruel and exploitative network boss. Here she joined another strong female cast including Sarah Polley and Julie Christie. Then came William H. Macy’s Door To Door, the true story of a man who, despite suffering from cerebral palsy, managed to make a living selling double-strength vanilla extract for four decades. Helen played Macy’s devoted mother (amazing as she was in actuality 56 and he 52), a font of inspiration and latterly battling Alzheimer’s. She’d follow this with Georgetown where she played a Washington hostess who’s forced to reinvent herself as a businesswoman and battle her own children when her husband leaves her a controlling interest in a newspaper. Then there was more Tennessee Williams with a lavish Showtime remake of The Roman Spring Of Mrs Stone, with Helen in the title role (originally played by Vivien Leigh) and Olivier Martinez as her Italian toy-boy. She’d be Emmy-nominated again for Roman Spring and Door To Door, the latter also seeing her up for a Golden Globe.
Still there was more. 2003 saw Mirren dominate the front-covers once more due to the mild controversy surrounding Brit flick Calendar Girls, which would bring her yet another Golden Globe nomination. This was based on the true tale of the Rylstone and District Women’s Institute who, in April 1999, published a calendar intended to raise money for a local hospital which had cared for the leukaemia-suffering husband of one of their number. As a twist, though, it was decided the calendar would feature photos of the women engaging in Women’s Institute activities - butt naked. Naturally, given that many of these ladies were getting on a bit, the calendar made worldwide headlines.
Calendar Girls would be another hit for Mirren who, as Chris Harper, played the driving force behind the idea (she also looked fantastic in her photo). It also saw her back in the press being questioned about - yes, you’ve guessed it - sex. And she was 58! And she'd just been made a Dame Of The British Empire! Now regularly winning decent Hollywood roles, she moved on to The Clearing, where she shared a perfect home with wealthy businessman Robert Redford. But just how perfect the set-up is is tested when Redford is kidnapped and held to ransom by a pissed-off Willem Dafoe. Mirren's taken aback by the blunt and intrusive police, then shocked when they find evidence of that Redford has been continuing an affair she thought over. She's a picture of restrained anger when she meets her rival and desperately tries to keep it together as Defoe demands she bring him the money. Indeed, much of the film's power stemmed from her reactions to her new situation and, finally, her awful predicament.
Next Mirren would step in to TV comedy, as Babette the kleptomaniac being the last ever guest caller on Frasier. Then would come Raising Helen, a Garry Marshall comedy where Kate Hudson, assistant to Helen at a modelling agency, must look after her sister's kids when she's killed. - Mirren naturally sacking her for her unprofessional behaviour. This would be followed by yet another outing as Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect 6 - by now among the most popular franchises in British TV history, with Helen continually voted one of the UK’s biggest (and sexiest) stars. She’d also join Kate Winslet in lending her voice to Pride, a high profile Simon Nye production part-animated by the Jim Henson Workshop. And there'd be a return to the stage as Christine Mannon in Mourning Becomes Elektra at the National, a deservedly Olivier-nominated performance.
In “real life” she attempted to make a difference too. She worked hard for ActionAid, fighting the trade in Asian sex slaves, and for Oxfam, battling for an end to arms sales to Africa, even addressing the United Nations in New York on the subject. She'd also campaign on behalf of children caught up in the Ugandan civil war. In the UK, she exhibited extraordinary un-luvvie-ness in interviewing Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London.
Work-wise, there'd be no let-up. Having popped up as the homeless, heroin-addicted mother of paramedic Cara Buono in an episode of TV drama Third Watch, she'd provide the voice of supercomputer Deep Thought in the cinema adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Unafraid of a joke at her own expense, she'd even appear in a short pastiche of one of her greatest filmic disaster, Caligula.
But most of Mirren's work continued to be either challenging, award-winning, or both. In Shadowboxer she and Cuba Gooding Jr played fellow assassins and lovers, their relationship darkened by Mirren's impending death from cancer. A neo-noir freak-out, it was arty and fascinating, too much for many, and in a way it was typical Mirren - her on-screen affair with Gooding purposefully subverting people's notions of age, race and sex.
Stepping back in time, she'd then return to TV to take the title role in the lavish Elizabeth I. Repelling the Spanish, Mary, Queen of Scots and all demands for a successor to the throne, she'd enjoy a long affair with Jeremy Irons' Dudley, then go after Irons' stepson, Essex, played by Hugh Dancy. It was a demanding role, perfect for Mirren, and she'd shine again when playing the second Queen Elizabeth in The Queen (given her aristocratic Russian background, the pair might actually be related). Directed by Stephen Frears, this would see Mirren play the monarch in the midst of the furore surrounding the death of Diana, trying to follow protocol and tradition while the country is demanding a wholly inappropriate state funeral. At first she's restrained, hiding her annoyance at efforts to break with royal protocol, then she's bewildered by the unending public hysteria. She's also shocked at being described as heartless, an accusation even implied by her own son, and she's further put out by Michael Sheen's overly chummy Tony Blair, her disapproval written all over her face. Beyond all this she'd be very human, trying to do her dignified best for all concerned, including a stag she encounters on the moors and shoos away from the approaching guns. The stag, she understands, is like her, an icon under threat, hunted down by his lessers. The look of wonder on her face as she gazes upon the creature was a wonder in itself. It was another brilliant performance, with Mirren taking the emotional repression she'd exhibited in Gosford Park and Prime Suspect to its painful limit.
Prime Suspect 7, where she sought the murderer of a pregnant 14-year-old while also struggling with alcoholism, the imminent death of her father and possible redundancy, must have come as light relief.
Come 2007, Mirren was being publicly lauded as one of the greats. She'd just won an Emmy for Elizabeth I. She'd won the Volpi Cup at Venice for The Queen. She was a treble Golden Globe nominee, for Elizabeth I, The Queen and Prime Suspect 7, winning for the first two. And then the Best Actress prizes for the Queen began to roll in, Mirren accepting them all with dignified delight. She won at the BAFTAs, in Boston, in Chicago, in Dallas, in Florida, in Kansas, in Las Vegas, in Los Angeles, in New York City, in Phoenix, in San Diego, in San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Toronto and Washington DC. At the Oscars of 2007 she was the hottest favourite in history, the bookies giving up and paying out before the ceremony even took place. And, of course, they were right, Mirren winning at the third time of asking.
Of course, she wouldn't stop there. Winning an Oscar for The Queen, she said, took the pressure off, allowing her to indulge in lighter material. Soon she was on our screens again, this time in Inkheart, Cornelia Funke's literary fantasy where a young girl's father discovers he can conjure characters from books. Trouble occurs when he draws a bad guy forth and his own wife is sucked into the novel, the bad guy later kidnapping him to secure his place in the real world. Thus the girl must rely on a gang of real and fictional friends - one being Mirren, playing her irascible book-collecting aunt Elinor, screaming around on her motorcycle - to seek out the titular Inkheart, the mysterious author of the novel concerned.
Come 2009, Mirren would find herself in State Of Play, the Hollywood adaptation of the BBC series. Here Russell Crowe would play an ace Washington reporter who begins to investigate a series of deaths he links to the shadowy PointCorp organisation, seemingly in league with the government. Mirren would appear as Crowe's editor, battling for the paper's integrity as she's ordered to cut costs and replace news with gossip. Next she could be seen in Racine's Phedre at the National Theatre's Lyttelton. Directed by Nicholas Hytner, she'd suffer tortures as she'd be crushed by passion for her own stepson, Dominic Cooper's Hippolytus. As part of the NT's Live project, the play would be filmed and broadcast live to some 70 cinemas on June 25th, later to be screened worldwide.
Mirren's next outing would be another important one. This was The Last Station where she'd return to her Russian roots to play Sofya, wife of Tolstoy. With Christopher Plummer as her famous author spouse, she battles interlopers and spies in her house, all trying to get Tolstoy to leave his literary legacy to the nation. Having born him 13 kids, Mirren knows her husband well, recognising his flaws but still loving him and, as she tries to protect him and herself, she's panicked, vicious, kind, manipulative and amusing. It was yet another powerful performance and would see her nominated for an Oscar (her fourth nomination) and a Golden Globe.
2010 would bring a welter of Mirren releases. First would come The Debt, based on Assaf Bernstein's 2007's movie Ha-Hov, where three young members of Mossad claim to have killed infamous Nazi war criminal the Surgeon of Birkenau and live off their fame for 30 years. Then a man appears in Ukraine saying he's that same, supposedly dead Nazi and the former agents - Mirren, Ciaran Hinds and Tom Wilkinson (Mirren's husband in Prince Of Jutland) must discover the truth and face the consequences. Following this there'd be Love Ranch, a rare opportunity to work with husband Taylor Hackford, where she and Joe Pesci would play a couple opening the first legal brothel in Nevada. Based on the true story of Joe and Sally Conforte and the Mustang Ranch they opened outside of Reno, this would see Pesci trying to outwit the authorities and Mirren running the show as the joint's madam.
After this would come a return to Blighty for a remake of Brighton Rock where Sam Riley would play young criminal Pinkie, involved in a death and believing he needs to marry or murder waitress Andrea Riseborough in order to escape the law. Mirren would play a brief acquaintance of the dead man, who involves the police in the affair and tries to save Riseborough. Next would come a return to Shakespeare with The Tempest, directed by Julie Taymor who'd earlier delivered a splendid version of Titus Andronicus. Here Mirren would take the lead as Prospera (usually Prospero, of course), a princess trapped on an island with her daughter Felicity Jones, as well as spirits Ariel and Caliban, played by Ben Whishaw and Djimon Hounsou. Drawing on magical powers, Mirren causes a shipwreck which bring characters from her past back into her life, ripe for revenge. Next would come the animated Australian production Guardians Of Ga'Hoole where she'd join such Antipodean greats as Geoffrey Rush, Sam Neill and Hugo Weaving in the tale of owls and totalitarianism. Then there'd be Red, another comic book adaptation, where former black ops agent Bruce Willis finds assassins are threatening his new life with Mary-Louise Parker. to survive, he must somehow reform his old team, featuring Mirren, Morgan Freeman and John Malkovich.
And next? Well, having played her in 1965 (her breakthrough), 1982 (roughing up Michael Gambon’s Antony) and 1998 (consuming Alan Rickman), dare Helen Mirren play the first pensionable Cleopatra? Will she continue to bare her body as she passes through her sixties, shocking us all as we realise we're still turned on? And will she continue to scrap it out with Dench, Smith, Rigg etc to see who’s the greatest of them all, snapping up the prizes as she goes? The answers are Probably, Hopefully and Definitely. And all this from a woman who describes herself as “famous for being cool about not being gorgeous”. In that opinion at least, she is utterly alone.Dominic Wills
MOVIES LIST
Herostratus (1967)
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1968)
Red Hot Shot (1969)
Age of Consent (1969)
Miss Julie (1972)
Savage Messiah (1972)
O Lucky Man! (1973)
Caesar and Claretta (1975)
Hamlet (1976)
The Quiz Kid (1979)
Caligula (1979)
Hussy (1980)
The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu (1980)
The Long Good Friday (1980)
Excalibur (1981)
Cal (1984)
2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984)
Faerie Tale Theatre: "The Little Mermaid" (1984)
Heavenly Pursuits (1985)
Coming Through (1985)
White Nights (1985)
The Mosquito Coast (1986)
Pascali's Island (1988)
When the Whales Came (1989)
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989)
Bethune: The Making of a Hero (1990)
The Comfort of Strangers (1990)
Where Angels Fear to Tread (1991)
The Hawk (1993)
Royal Deceit (1993)
The Madness of King George (1994)
The Snow Queen (1995)
Some Mother's Son (1996)
Losing Chase (1996)
Critical Care (1997)
Sidoglio Smithee (1998)
The Prince of Egypt (1998)
The Passion of Ayn Rand (1999)
Teaching Mrs. Tingle (1999)
Greenfingers (2000)
The Pledge (2001)
Last Orders (2001)
Gosford Park (2001)
The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (2003)
Calendar Girls (2003)
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2004)
The Clearing (2004)
Raising Helen (2004)
Elizabeth I (2005)
Shadowboxer (2005)
The Queen (2006)
National Treasure: Book of Secrets (2007)
Inkheart (2008)
State of Play (2009)
The Last Station (2009)
Love Ranch (2010)
The Debt (2010)
The Tempest (2010)
Brighton Rock (2010)
Red (2010)
Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole (2010)
Arthur (2011)
AWARDS LIST
Academy Award Nominations
Best Actress
2006 – The Queen
2009 – The Last Station
Best Supporting Actress
1994 – The Madness of King George
2001 – Gosford Park
Emmy Awards
Awards won are indicated by bold lettering.
Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or Movie
1993 – Prime Suspect 2
1994 – Prime Suspect 3
1996 – Prime Suspect 4: "Scent of Darkness"
1997 – Prime Suspect 5: Errors of Judgment
1999 – The Passion of Ayn Rand
2003 – The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
2004 – Prime Suspect 6: The Last Witness
2006 – Elizabeth I
2007 – Prime Suspect: The Final Act
Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or Movie
2003 – Door to Door
Film awards
In 1984, Mirren won Best Actress for her role in the film Cal at the Cannes Film Festival and the 1985 Evening Standard British Film Awards. In 1994 and 2001, she was nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her roles in The Madness of King George and Gosford Park, respectively. In 1995, she had also been awarded for Best Actress once again in Cannes for playing Queen Charlotte in The Madness of King George. In 2002, she received the SAG Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture for Gosford Park. Mirren is the first female actress to be nominated for three acting performances at the Golden Globe Awards in the same year. She won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Leading Role in the movie drama category for Stephen Frears' The Queen in 2006 (along with two nominations in the Actress in a Mini-series or TV Movie category for Elizabeth I, and Prime Suspect: Final Act). She won both Golden Globes for The Queen and Elizabeth I and also won two SAG awards the same year for the same roles. Mirren is the third actor to win two Golden Globes in the same year, and the first ever to win for both leading roles in TV and film in the same year. She is one of only three actresses (the first was Liza Minnelli in 1973 and then decades later Helen Hunt) to win a Golden Globe, an Oscar and an Emmy for performances given in the same year.
Along with the Golden Globe, Mirren's acclaimed performance in The Queen won her the 2007 Academy Award for Best Actress. She also received Best Actress awards from the Venice Film Festival, Broadcast Film Critics, National Board of Review, Satellite Awards, Screen Actors Guild and a BAFTA, as well as critics awards from all over the world. Entertainment Weekly recently ranked her Number 2 for Entertainer of the Year for 2006 and also won the award for best actress in film at the new Greatest Britons Awards for her role in The Queen. In 2007 Mirren became an Honorary Patron of the University Philosophical Society at Trinity College Dublin.
She won the Best Actress award at the 2009 Rome International Film Festival for her performance as Tolstoy's wife in The Last Station.
Along with the Golden Globe, Mirren's acclaimed performance in The Queen won her the 2007 Academy Award for Best Actress. She also received Best Actress awards from the Venice Film Festival, Broadcast Film Critics, National Board of Review, Satellite Awards, Screen Actors Guild and a BAFTA, as well as critics awards from all over the world. Entertainment Weekly recently ranked her Number 2 for Entertainer of the Year for 2006 and also won the award for best actress in film at the new Greatest Britons Awards for her role in The Queen. In 2007 Mirren became an Honorary Patron of the University Philosophical Society at Trinity College Dublin.
She won the Best Actress award at the 2009 Rome International Film Festival for her performance as Tolstoy's wife in The Last Station.
No comments:
Post a Comment