HELEN MIRREN: A dame in her prime
When she was just 25 and a fledgeling member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Helen Mirren had a crisis of confidence and went to an Indian hand-reader of remarkable prescience. He predicted that the height of her acting success would not be reached until she was in her late forties.
It may not have been reached yet. At the age of 61, this forthright, plain-speaking daughter of a Russian taxi driver and a British mother is being fêted at the Venice Film Festival for her role as that most delicately spoken of people, the Queen, in the new film of the same name. Its focus is the Royal Family in the days immediately after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Plaudits for her complex performance and talk of an Oscar nomination follow on the heels of an Emmy last month for portraying the first Queen Elizabeth in a television production.
Dame Helen was born in Chiswick and spent a small part of her childhood as Ilyena Lydia Mironova before her father changed the family name. The idea of reinvention seems to have stuck. “What I’ve always done is to change the rules in my life,” she told one interviewer. The switchback between Shakespeare and edgy contemporary drama is testament to that restless energy, as is her flitting between a career in Hollywood and Britain. Her husband is the American director Taylor Hackford.
There is an appealing grit to Dame Helen, and an undeniable sex appeal from a woman who specialises in playing unglamorous women. She posed nude on the cover of Radio Times for her fiftieth birthday, raising a silent cheer from women everywhere fed up with confronting sexual invisibility in middle age.
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She is arguably the most regarded of British television performers for her tenure in the Prime Suspect police drama series, which came after a long period of regard, if not renown, as an actress. She is to be seen next month in the seventh and final instalment playing Jane Tennison, the tough officer making it in a brutalised world of male coppers. She has described the role, which began in 1991, as “the biggest break of my career”. It came six years after she gave up Britain altogether for Hollywood.
But her flame has flickered less strongly in the US. Part of her appeal there is her no-nonsense Britishness, so she is remembered more for her parts in The Madness of King George and Gosford Park, for which she received Oscar nominations, than in 2010 and Caligula. Curiously, for somebody raised an avowed republican and who still says that she loathes the idea of aristocracy, Dame Helen owes rather a lot to royalty and nobility.