Descended from Russian gentry, yet utterly British, national treasure Helen Mirren goes back to her Southend roots and talks Queen, country, bustier tops and Paris Hilton.
We’re here in end-of-season Southend-on-Sea to talk about Helen Mirren’s autobiography, but inevitably we spend a lot of time talking about the Queen. “I can now confess,” she says, over tea and sandwiches in a local restaurant, “that after I’d done my research and before we started shooting, I wrote to her to say we’re making this film and I am playing you and I will do my best.” And why did she do that? “Because I thought it was polite.”
Did the Queen write back? “I didn’t hear back from her directly. I got a wonderful non-committal letter from a secretary saying the Queen read your letter with interest and thank you for letting us know.” And after the film came out, Mirren says, “I was invited to dinner. I don’t think it would have just been me and the Queen, I would have been one of maybe 50. I couldn’t go. I was upset about it, but I was in South Dakota filming. I felt that [invitation] was an indication of not necessarily pleasure, but at least not displeasure.”
Do we definitely know, I ask, that she’s seen it? “No,” says Mirren. But we kind of assume she has? “We kind of assume she has. I mean, how could you resist?” She pulls apart a sandwich, discards the bread, eats the filling. Are you on Atkins? I ask. “No, I just prefer what’s in sandwiches.” She says she hasn’t eaten since yesterday, when she flew in to London from Los Angeles; it’s now mid afternoon.
When we met four years ago, I start to say, and she interrupts. “Was it that long ago? No, please! In the Savoy? I thought it was last year! What was it for?” Calendar Girls, I say. “Oh, that’s very alarming,” she says, adding archly, “you obviously made a big impression that reverberated in my memory.” I simper like a schoolgirl.
In the way it is sometimes said of such-and-such a man that he really likes women, I think you could say Dame Helen really likes men. And (I feel the generalisation is valid) we really like her. Sexy, serious, funny, bright, effortlessly flattering your vanity: what’s not to like? In any case, I’m biased: when we met before, she said I looked like an ex-boyfriend from the Seventies, George Galitzine, Prince George Galitzine no less, whose family, like the Mirrens, or Mironovs as they were then, were White Russian émigrés from the revolution. Naturally, I found the comparison rather thrilling, and was hoping for more of the same down here where the Thames meets the sea.
Still, back to the question, which was that four years ago she’d said she lived mostly in LA, what’s the situation now? “I spend a lot of time there because my husband [Taylor Hackford, film director, they married in 1997] is there. My home is England. If I was forced to choose, I’d choose England.” Since The Queen, however, and especially since her Best Actress Oscar for it, it is likely she’ll be spending more time in Hollywood. She hasn’t, she says, slept in the same bed for more than three weeks at a stretch in the past five years.
“The Oscar has iconic connotations for the Americans I hadn’t grasped,” she says. “You are, for the rest of your life, an Oscar winner. It’s like winning an honour here, it becomes part of your name. When I first came to Los Angeles, people would literally elbow me aside to get to my husband. After the success of Prime Suspect they started at least talking to me. Now they elbow my husband aside.” How is he with that? “Totally cool. He knows the way it works.”
She has just made National Treasure 2, “a full-on Hollywood adventure movie, really good fun, with Nic Cage, Jon Voight, Harvey Keitel, Ed Harris. I play Nic Cage’s mother, an expert in ancient languages.” Do you help solve whatever it is needs to be solved? “Exactly. Jon Voight plays the father. We’re estranged.” And working together effects a reconciliation? “How did you guess?” she laughs.
Would she have been offered that sort of role before the success of The Queen? “Well, ironically if I had been offered it before I probably would have turned it down. They paid me a lot more money; that’s always an incentive, isn’t it? And partly I felt, not unassailable, but I felt ‘It’s OK, you’ve done that [the Queen] and people know you can do that…’ I wanted something that was pure fun to do; something I didn’t have to angst about.” Does she have to act much in this new film? “No,” she says, and laughs. “But you have to be. A lot of people can’t act on film, they freeze up. You have to stay loose and natural.”
Would she have been sniffy about this kind of role pre-Queen? “Yes, I would have been frightened of being identified with it. You can get pigeonholed very quickly.” And now, post-Queen, you feel freed up to do more lightweight material? “Yes.” Aren’t you sort of admitting you’ve done the best work you can do? “Yeah, probably. I did feel that, not necessarily after The Queen but after Elizabeth I [a TV series she made immediately prior to The Queen]. I remember thinking you’ll never have a role like this again. I gave it everything I had.”
The young Mirren, despite instant acclaim at the National Youth Theatre and the RSC, felt awkward. “When I started acting I felt like I didn’t fit in to the Zeitgeist, if that’s the right word, of British theatrical culture. I wasn’t an English Rosey sort of person.” Also, she had had a “weird, hybrid working-class background”, and most contemporaries were posher. She can still rail against “that ‘you’re not one of us’ [attitude], that sense of privilege and, what’s the other word?” Entitlement? “Entitlement! That drives me crazy,” as do “City boys getting a f****** great bonus basically for cheating people successfully for a year.”
Her twenties were riven, she says, by self-doubt and insecurity, and neither have quite disappeared now she is 62. “I was never exuberant, I was always rather interior, rather Russian in that sense.” She was and is, she says, very much an actress who “loved imaginatively disappearing into another world” rather than a “look-at-me” type… “It’s all about continuing to work and not sitting back and saying ‘That’s it’, which I am now doing, but I don’t think I am really.”
In LA, she is “very ungregarious, a bit of a loner. I have family there now [her nephew and stepsons, she never wanted children of her own], so I see them. When I’m out, I love it, but when the moment comes to go out, I wish I could stay in. I’m superuncool, a nerdy person, always embarrassed and inept, and not Kate Moss basically.”
Although she came to prominence in the Sixties, and benefited from the meritocratic aspects of that decade, such as they were, she says she is “not really a Sixties figure”. She was, she says, “a serial monogamist… All my friends were smoking dope, but I was the one who’d go to rehearsals at ten in the morning and then do a show at night.” A rebel who held it together? “Yes,” she agrees, then changes her mind. “No, I wasn’t a rebel, I was always a good girl.”
With the emphasis on girl. “I’m not an old-school feminist, I never was. I was always a new-school feminist, if you like. I was a feminist who wanted to wear gold high-heeled shoes and bustier tops and I didn’t see a conflict there and I still don’t.” What does she make of, say, Paris Hilton? “I don’t applaud Paris Hilton,” she starts to say, “no, but actually I do. I think she’s pretty cool. She’s developed, like Princess Diana, that deliberate foolishness which is disarming.”
Doesn’t that depress her, though? “No. I like girlie stuff. You can talk about football and cars endlessly and unbelievably boringly, why can’t you talk about shoes and shopping and still earn as much as a bloke? I find,” she adds, “both exaggerated maleness and exaggerated femaleness a bit boring, but I don’t judge between the one and the other. To me, Jeremy Clarkson and Paris Hilton are one and the same, because they’re both very smart and deliberately milking it.” She is about to guest on Top Gear. “I must remember to tell Jeremy he reminds me of Paris Hilton.”
The role of Elizabeth II, she found, she says, “weirdly easy. It’s often the way; when things come peculiarly easily, you’re doing it right. You think you don’t deserve it, but it’s informed by all the work you did before.” What prepared her for the role? “Years of getting it wrong, being lazy. You have to put the work in. You can’t wing it.” Emotionally, she drew on her feelings about her parents’ generation, “Although she [the Queen] is younger than them, the world she came out of was my parents’ experience, that sense of tradition and stoicism. I found it very moving to inhabit that.”
I ask where her obvious admiration for Elizabeth Windsor leaves her professed republicanism. “I’m not quite sure. You still look at the Royal Family and go, ‘Oh, for God’s sake! It’s ridiculous!’ But in its ridiculousness I have a very soft spot for it.” The institution? Or her? “For her, and to a certain extent for the institution. You throw things out at your peril. Just to arbitrarily go, ‘Oh, we’ve had enough of that’ and boot it out is kind of infantile.” She doesn’t regret her “I give you the Queen” toast in her speech on Oscar night. “Ah, f*** it, no. It was a joke. I’m not that tight-arsed about anything.”
Not much danger of the Queen being booted out at the moment, anyway, thanks in part to the PR instincts of Tony Blair a decade ago, as detailed in the film, and thanks also to Mirren herself, who managed to pull off the sensationally unlikely trick of turning an elderly frumpy conservative countrywoman into someone not only sympathetic, but dangerously close to cool. Would she still call herself a republican? “I don’t think I am a republican any more, no,” she says. “But I do look at that whole class system; that whole class are just,” she searches for the words, “absurd and horrible.”
She shivers. “You might be one of them, Robert,” she says, “you probably are.” I say I’m not, even though (all professionalism abandoned as I sense my opening) I look like a Russian prince. “You do!” she says, “Sandy and I were both gobstruck!” (Sandy is Mirren’s pal and personal assistant. She also had a thing with this Galitzine character.) “Your nose is a pointy Russian nose exactly like Georgie’s father’s!” We break off (forgive the indulgence) to eat chocolate cake and talk about my nose.
The Galitzines, Mirren explains, my stomach and ego sufficiently stoked for the time being, “came out with money. The Mironovs didn’t.” In any case, “the Galitzines were a very royal family. We were more Chekovian upper middle class, gentry. Her grandfather, a Tsarist army officer, was in London negotiating an arms deal when the revolution stranded him in 1917. So it’s wrong to say she is descended from Russian aristocrats? “Well, my great grandmother was a countess.”
Her grandfather, and then her father, became taxi drivers. Her mother is from the East End of London. Mirren was born Ilyena Mironov, in 1945. They lived first in Westcliff, then in Leigh, just up the road from where we are now. She likes coming back. “It’s more familiar to me here than anywhere else in the world. The street names, the architecture, the place names, the smell, the place you grew up gets into your subconscious.”
Down at the front for the photos, the grey sky low over the estuary, boats drawn up on the sand, the wind whipping her scarf, day trippers double-taking as she emerges from a chauffeured black BMW, Mirren watches a bunch of teenagers smoking under a jetty. “That was me, 45 years ago. I suppose you want me to show you where I had my first snog?” she groans. I say sure. “Well, I absolutely did not snog in Southend.”
She shows me the Victorian square where her friend Jenny lived. “She was beautiful. I was very much the second banana.” Her parents, in any event, were quite strict. “I wasn’t allowed on a date until I was 17.” In the Sixties, she’d go to the Shrubbery, a coffee bar, still there, now called the Terrace. Earlier in childhood, “The most delicious thing in the world was a scoop of Rossi’s ice-cream dropped into a cherryade.” With these cosy memories, she is safe and solid and Anglo, sharing the same moral universe as Jane Tennison, her most well-known character. And yet, on stage and screen (and I’m guessing in real life, too), she can be moody, intense, dangerous, seductive, as exotic as Cleopatra, her most celebrated stage role. Perhaps it is this combination that explains her appeal.
“My sister and I have what we call our Russian moments,” she says, “sort of soulful.” As an adolescent, her Russianness “was an awkward thing you didn’t mention. My grandfather spoke to my father in Russian and he would answer in English [hence, she never learnt Russian]. As far as he was concerned, there was no going back.”
And yet, for his daughters, 90 years after the family left, there has been a going back. Earlier this year Mirren and her elder sister Kate visited the former Mironov estate near Smolensk that their grandfather had told them about as children. “He’d show me this map he’d made: this is where the rose garden was, this is where the stables were. He was intensely homesick.” The current owner, a young businessman who turned up with four bodyguards, said “Welcome to my land” to the Mirren sisters. “I replied ‘No, welcome to my land’,” says Mirren. If Russia were in the European Union, she says (she quaintly calls it the Common Market), “Kate and I could say, ‘I’m sorry, this is ours.’ Not that we’d dream of it. Once he realised we weren’t going to claim it, the owner said, ‘I would like to offer you a piece of land to build a house.’” With homes in London, LA, New York and the south of France, she hardly needs another one on the Russian Steppe.
The original house had been destroyed long ago, she says. “But you can’t destroy a landscape; the trees, the rivers, the endless plain.” Indeed, no, I say, trying to sound all mournful and Slavic, half-convincing myself that my own forebears’ tracts of the Motherland had also been swept away by the march of history. As and when we next meet, which I very much hope we will, I’m going to grow a moustache, get a cloak, maybe a sword, dress up like Pushkin or Tolstoy, inhabit the role fully.
