It may not be Buckingham Palace but British actress Helen Mirren, who won an Oscar for “The Queen”, hopes to fix up a tumbledown Italian farmhouse into a country estate fit for a star.
Local officials in the southern Italian province of Puglia said on Friday that 61-year-old Mirren, previously best known as a hard-bitten cop in the TV series “Prime Suspect”, is in talks to buy a 16th century estate which is partly in ruins.
The honey-coloured pile in fields dotted with cactus is in the Salento region, Italy’s “heel”, which Mirren discovered when collecting a prize at the Salento International Film Festival. She is expected in Puglia next week to finalise the deal.