Helen Mirren has a commanding presence in front of a camera.
The photo shoot is winding down but Mirren isn’t. Her eyes manipulate the camera; intense shades of grey, blue and green that are warm and stern at the same time. Her Vivienne Westwood evening gown is tightly fitted and regal.
Earlier this year, Mirren won an Oscar for her emotionally hemmed-in performance of Elizabeth II in The Queen that managed to portray vulnerability and power at the same time. But what many film goers didn’t realise is that nobility has always been in her blood.
She was born Ilyena Vasilievna Mironov in Ilford, Essex, daughter of a taxi driver and sometime viola player.
Her grandfather, a Russian nobleman called Pyotr Mironov, had come to Britain to negotiate an arms deal. But in 1917 he was unable to return out of their home because the Russian Revolution had broken out.
The Bolsheviks confiscated the family estate and their home was eventually destroyed by the Nazis. Stranded in Britain, he later wrote to his six sisters about his talented granddaughter.
When he died, Helen inherited his papers, consisting of letters from his mother and sisters and his memoirs – all in Russian. It wasn’t until a Russian actor, who was appearing in Prime Suspect, offered to translate them that the full extent of her family’s bitter change in circumstances became apparent.
“My great-aunts were thrown out of their house,” say Helen. “They had to live in a little flat with six other families. My great-grandmother died of stomach cancer in miserable circumstances.”
The fact that one of her grandfather’s sisters, Valentina, had married someone high up in the Communist Party probably saved them from Stalin’s harsh labour camps. Valentina was also a typist for theatrical innovator Stanislavsky. Sitting on her grandfather’s knee listening to tales of her family’s old estate started a lifelong fascination with the country.
Mirren’s roots are to be unravelled even further in a TV documentary called The Journey, in which she hopes to meet long-lost relatives and track down the site of her grandfather’s family estate and the family graveyard at Gzhatsk, more than 200 miles west of Moscow. She will also use the trip as inspiration for a book she’s writing about her old family photographs.
She speaks of her grandfather with immense sadness. “He was cut off by the Revolution. He went from being a member of the landed gentry to being a taxi driver.”
Her father, on the other hand, was a passionate socialist. Was it her aristocratic side that drew her to feeling sympathy for the Queen? “I am not a monarchist,” she counters. “I loathe the British class system and the Royal Family are the pinnacle of all that. It enrages me. But I grew to fall in love with the Queen. I am a Queenist. She never got bulimic or alcoholic. She never went to a psychiatrist. She held steady. She never got fat. She exercised self-control. I don’t mean she did that in an uptight, repressed way, it’s just a question of her having real class, and that’s nothing to do with the class system.”
And that’s something else she has in common with Elizabeth II. “I am pretty good at self-discipline,” she says brightly, then contradicts herself quite charmingly.
“I mean, I don’t exercise, I don’t eat the right food. I am intimidated by people like Madonna who have that incredible drive. I don’t allow myself to become emotionally insecure or unstable, though. I don’t allow myself to spiral out of control. I think that has to do with not being narcissistic or obsessed with yourself. Step back; you are not that important in this world.”
Mirren is probably the most famously sexy older woman – but it wasn’t always a blessing. When she was younger she was certainly pretty, but in a sexy way which she says stopped her being considered for weightier parts. Something inside of her seemed suddenly to metamorphose when she got past 40.
She’s had several affairs with handsome men. Memorably, she was with Liam Neeson in his prime. I remember him telling me that she taught him a lot. She taught him sophistication (i.e. how to eat prawns).
There is a sense, though, that Mirren was not always the competent, well-put-together person she is today.
She must have been hurt many times before her late-in-life marriage to Taylor Hackford, the Hollywood director who was Oscar-nominated for Ray. They met when he directed her in the 1985 film White Nights, eventually marrying in the Scottish Highlands in December 1997.
She’s currently in New York because Hackford is developing a musical for Broadway, although they also have homes in LA and London. “So I came here to join him,” says Helen. “I was just thinking I wonder if Taylor hadn’t been in my life, would I be where I am, and I kind of doubt it.
“We came to each other grown up, professionally formed, which was nice. I was in my late 30s and I’m so aligned to him. We have been completely generous and loyal in terms of each other’s work. We allow each other to get on with it and don’t interfere. We don’t criticise because that is not your job as a partner. He has been very supportive of me and I am of him, especially two years ago when he was nominated for directing Ray.”
There’s a twinkle in her eyes as she talks about him. And it’s mutual. In a recent article, he described her as “never narcissistic, very smart and intuitive”.
She lets out a joyous cackle. “How lovely. Did he say that? How fabulous! I’ll give him a big kiss when I get home.” And you know she will.
“What I find in life – and in my job in particular – is that if you do something together, you must recognise that you are part of the group, and it’s only by raising your game that the whole thing gets better.” So she’s anti-ego but pro-perfectionist.
There are lots of contradictions that make Helen Mirren work. She can come over as grand, but she’s also funny. She went to collect her Emmy for Prime Suspect in a diaphanous white dress and plastic ‘stripper’ shoes. This means she is also fun. Her manner is regal and coquettish.
She has been nominated for two Oscars before, for her parts in The Madness Of King George and Gosford Park. In both she delivered well thought-out, insular performances.
But she’s also played over-the-top Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth. She’s taken her clothes off in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover and more recently in Calendar Girls.
“As you get older, the naked stuff gets easier because it’s more to do with the role than what the men in the audience are thinking. There’s a liberation about it. Naked is easier now than when I was younger because then, there weren’t so many women on set. Now, everybody’s used to it.”
As DCI Tennison in Prime Suspect, she etched her way into the nation’s psyche for giving such a brutally realistic performance, devoid of physical glamour.
Was she sad to retire the character for good? “No. I was ready to let her go, although I loved doing the last one about the mistakes people make in their life and how they overcome them. It’s about, where does your life go?”
The last episode was about Tennison’s dying father and how she’d focused on the career ladder, not showing any love for him, and yet about to take enforced retirement.
You look at Helen in her Vivienne Westwood corseted glory and you imagine it must be difficult for her to look terrible.
“Not at all,” she says.
She scrunches her chin back into her face and really does look like the Queen. It ages her 20 years instantly without make-up.
Mirren has always worked steadily as an actress but this past year, the final Prime Suspect and its subsequent accolades and the Oscar for The Queen must have elevated her to a new level. Scripts must be blocking up her door.
“No, it hasn’t made a difference to anything,” she says. “My instinct is that it’s time for more theatre. There isn’t a role I’m particularly hankering for, though I wouldn’t mind playing Catherine the Great; she was extraordinary.”
This would neatly combine her Russianness, her regalness and her strangeness. In the beginning of her career, she said she wasn’t pretty enough for Hollywood.
“So I had to come at it from another direction. The kind of material that I was attracted to and the fact that I wanted to maintain my theatre work meant I was never going to come to LA and sit there waiting. But I have done bimbo roles. When you’re younger, it’s almost all bimbo roles, even if they’re in art films.”
It’s almost as if by playing the Queen, she was able to retire temporarily from being a sexual icon.
“I loved giving myself a double chin. But at first I was so upset when I saw those shoes and boxy tweed skirts.”
She pulls a face.
“In the end, I loved it. And when she was young, she was Elizabeth Taylor beautiful. This is a woman who could get her clothes made anywhere in the world and have the most incredible stylists, but she didn’t. It’s a different kind of vanity, isn’t it?”
Mirren herself loves the dressing up, although she admits: “You do make terrible mistakes sometimes.” Does she think those stripper shoes were a mistake?
“Oh, no. Everybody’s wearing them now. And if you’re a short***e like me, and Nicole Kidman comes wafting by on the red carpet and she’s way up there,” Helen’s finger points to the ceiling, “you just have to have them.
“On the red carpet you’ve got to feel strong and comfortable, and so often when you have people buzzing around you, you start to feel like somebody else. What’s most important is to wear something that makes you feel yourself.”
She has said that if she hadn’t been an actor she would have been a hairdresser.
“Yes. I’m very good at doing my own hair: I just go snip, snip and snip right around the back. I can’t be bothered to go to the hairdresser’s. I spend so much time in the make-up chair that I don’t want to sit there when I don’t have to.”
This tells you a lot about Mirren and her special kind of vanity.
She likes no fuss, no nonsense, yet she likes to keep everything under her control. But there’s just enough vulnerability in there to make her likeable.
