Victoria in The Long Good Friday (1980)
When Mirren was first asked to play Bob Hoskins’s girlfriend in the British crime classic, her character, she has said, “kind of sucked” — a frustratingly air-headed gangster’s moll. The chastened film-makers duly beefed up the role and her take on Victoria had a captivating mix of intelligence, strength, vulnerability, sex appeal — and some of the most stylish on-screen smoking since Lauren Bacall.
Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect (1991-2006)
It’s a toss-up as to which is her defining role — Elizabeth II (see below) or DCI Tennison, the formidable protagonist of Lynda La Plante’s much-garlanded police procedural series. The no-nonsense yet utterly humane way in which she portrayed Tennison’s battles, both professional (murder, paedophilia, prostitution) and private (alcoholism, institutional sexism, abortion), won Mirren three Baftas, two Emmys and a place alongside Columbo and Poirot in the pantheon of TV detectives.
Natalya Petrovna in A Month in the Country (West End, 1994; Broadway, 1995)
Mirren has done distinguished stage work on both sides of the Atlantic but her finest hour came in Turgenev’s comedy of manners, as a married aristocrat, idling away her life on a Russian estate in the 1840s, who falls for her son’s tutor. It was one of the great performances, says the former Times theatre critic Benedict Nightingale, one that “best displayed her technical prowess, her emotional daring, her wit, her sense of human complexity — well, her everything”.
Mrs Wilson in Gosford Park (2001)
It wasn’t her biggest role but Mirren’s Oscar-nominated turn in Robert Altman’s upstairs-downstairs masterpiece — a Downton Abbey for grown-ups — showed that she can play proles as well as poshos and that she is just as comfortable in an ensemble as she is with marquee roles. Mirren’s housekeeper is a small but pivotal role in the revisionist country-house mystery — her scenes with Eileen Atkins and Clive Owen were among the subtlest and most affecting of her career.
Elizabeth II in The Queen (2006) and The Audience (2013)
We already knew she could do royals — an Emmy-winning Queen Bess on TV in Elizabeth I, an Oscar-nominated Queen Charlotte in The Madness of King George. But Mirren became a global star for playing our current monarch in The Queen, pulling on a Barbour and some discrete extra padding to portray a conflicted ER dealing with the PR fallout after Diana’s death. That won her an Oscar, which she followed last year with an Olivier for playing the same character, meeting prime ministers over six decades in Peter Morgan’s play The Audience.