Helen Mirren first gave an interview to this newspaper 42 years ago. All things considered, it could have gone better. The article was headlined “I’ve been sexy-looking since I was 14.” Three days later she wrote to the letters page. “It is a shame that being interviewed by the Guardian should turn out to be such a miserable experience.” Yes, she says with a rueful smile, she well remembers that interview, and its emphasis on her ambition and her looks. (“Miss Mirren is still widely regarded as a sexy actress.”) She’s foggier on the matter of her correspondence, but chuckles when I read out the sign-off line, in which she laments that the grotesque image of herself presented in print “will be following me around for something like the next seven or 10 years”. We are both thinking the same thing, but she says it first: “It was a lot longer than that, wasn’t it?”
The general media obsession with Mirren’s sex life has been replaced these days by a kind of awe, no less misogynistic, that a woman in her 60s can look attractive and happy. At 65, Mirren is adored and venerated; if it’s true that, after being made a Dame in 2003 and winning an Oscar in 2007 for playing the title role in The Queen, she has become that dreaded property, a national treasure, then at least she is one with plenty of sharp edges capable of giving you a painful nick if you’re not careful. She has short, silver hair and is dressed today in a burgundy cardigan, a dark skirt and scarlet tights. The killer touches are her pair of leopard-print high heels, and pendulous earrings like gold ingots. On her left hand I spot the famous tattoo often cited as evidence of her wildness: it’s a lakesh, comprising two interlocking crosses, which she had done in her 20s when she was drunk. It looks blurred and muddy-green. She has variously claimed she keeps the tattoo to help her tell one hand from the other, or as a memento of her time in the merchant navy, or (the real reason) to remind her, now she has been happily married for 14 years to the director Taylor Hackford, that she was “sometimes a bad girl in the past”.
Mirren seems sanguine about the offhand treatment meted out to her in that past. “I’m older now. These things pass, as you will find, Ryan. There’s a scary moment when you realise you’re no longer the youngest person in the room. Especially if you’ve been a successful young person. That’s followed, of course, by the realisation that you’re actually the oldest person in the room.” Her laughter is sudden and furious, overriding the classical music burbling away in the background of her hotel room. “It’s all part of the natural progress of life. When you’re young, you wonder what all these old people are droning on about, trying to impart their wisdom. It’s not relevant to you because being young is such a specific thing. Thank God for that. Thank God for the young people who go out and demonstrate against rampant capitalism or whatever.”
We harrumph about the sexism with which she had to contend during an abrasive interrogation from Michael Parkinson on his chatshow in 1975. “Even now it’s unbelievable, isn’t it?” she gasps. “And he completely denies to this day he was being sexist. You can tell when he looks at me that there’s all this interference getting in the way of what he’s seeing.” Contrast that, she says, with Russell Brand, her co-star in two new pictures released this spring. “The penny dropped for me fairly recently with Russell. The thing about him is he likes women, and not a lot of men do. That’s why women like him. He’s genuinely interested in us. Women melt in his presence.” Her voice has grown strikingly soft and approving.
Mirren and Brand are becoming quite the double act. Last weekend they appeared on stage together at the Oscars; some have even suggested they should present next year’s show. This is greeted initially with a delighted hoot from Mirren (“Oooh, yes, I like it!”) followed after a moment’s consideration by an exclamation of horror (“Oh, no, don’t. With Russell? Please! Anything could happen … ”). They will soon be seen in a remake of the 1981 comedy Arthur, with Brand in the Dudley Moore role of the drunk, immature playboy, and Mirren as Hobson, formerly Arthur’s butler played by John Gielgud, but now reimagined as his nanny.
Gielgud is one of Mirren’s heroes (“He made such courageous choices”), and by a strange coincidence she also steps into his shoes in another new picture that requires a central character to switch gender. In Julie Taymor’s film of The Tempest, Mirren plays Prospera, a female Prospero. If the movie can’t compete with the inventiveness of Prospero’s Books, in which Gielgud starred, there’s no doubting Mirren’s visceral feel for the material. “I believe kids shouldn’t be taught Shakespeare,” she says firmly. “They should experience it first by seeing a great production.” Her own first taste came in an amateur Hamlet in the Essex seaside town of Southend-on-Sea, not far from Westcliff-on-Sea where she grew up with her Russian father and English mother. “I walked out of that theatre at the end in another world. It’s such an amazing thriller, though I don’t suppose it was a very good production. I do remember lots of guys in tights, and that obviously had its own attractions.”
She has spent so much of her life performing Shakespeare, and regrets now the paucity of parts he wrote for older women. “I don’t want to play Gertrude,” she huffs. “I want to play Hamlet.” Her other hero, besides Gielgud, is Gérard Depardieu. She was on a panel with him once at the Sundance festival, and he said something which changed the way she felt about acting. Asked how he approaches a role, Depardieu replied: “I look at the page. If it says ‘gangster’, I play a gangster. If it says ‘shopkeeper’, I play a shopkeeper.” Mirren claps her hands. “A light bulb went on in my brain. I thought, ‘That’s it! Just play what’s on the page.’ I’ve followed that ever since. If it says, ‘Over-the-hill, angry woman with no makeup gets out of bed,’ that’s what I’ll play. I don’t mess it up with, ‘What’s her back story?’”
That said, there have been times when Mirren’s input into the script have turned a film around. When she read Barrie Keeffe’s screenplay for The Long Good Friday, she says she knew it was “a brilliant piece of literature”. The only trouble was her character, Victoria, girlfriend to Bob Hoskins’s gangster Harold Shand, was a big nothing. Making the film, she has said, was no fun; she had to fight every day. “It’s true,” she says. “On the page she was a cipher. I really wanted to drag her into the storyline. I couldn’t have done it without Bob, who gave me so much support.” The film is inconceivable now without Victoria’s role as the sane counsel behind Harold’s fiery brutishness. (Or, for that matter, without the scene where Charlie from Casualty, of all people, offers to lick every inch of her body).
No performer of Mirren’s stature quite evokes the same mix of the earthy and the sophisticated, the light-hearted and the grave. Her intelligence is amplified by her hint of haughtiness, as the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael understood when she observed: “Probably no other actress can let you know as fast and economically as she can that she’s playing a distinguished and important woman.” Her most indelible performances play on the air of disappointment or weariness that hangs about her – the defeated Northern Irish widow who falls unwittingly for her husband’s young killer in Cal; the gangster’s moll humiliated for kicks in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover; the belligerent and bullied police detective Jane Tennison in the Prime Suspect series; the ashen-faced housekeeper, too wounded to feel much pain any more, in Gosford Park; and, of course, Elizabeth Windsor, barricading herself against the unreasonable demands of her sentimental subjects like a woman doggedly trying to hold back the tide.
One of the thrills of any actor’s work as they get older is the ability to draw on the resonances of their persona or past performances. It’s hard, for instance, not to see echoes of Mirren’s own professional battles when Tennison rails against institutionalised sexism in Prime Suspect. “In a way, Prime Suspect was 10 years late,” she says. “In my profession, you’re not punished for being young – in fact you’re rewarded – but it’s not the same for most women. I was part of the first generation of girls and women to be educated and go to grammar school even if we didn’t have much money. Then that generation went ‘OK, great’, and went into medicine or the police, and hit this wall of discrimination from older men who hadn’t caught up. By the time Prime Suspect came out, those women had been fighting away for 20 years, unable to say anything about it, because the last thing you want to do is whine about it. When they saw Prime Suspect, they saw their struggles on screen. I never realised that at the time.”
Of course, any role Mirren takes now is bound to have an extra frisson for being seen through the prism of The Queen, as well she knows. When she played a retired assassin in the recent action movie Red, it wasn’t just Mirren producing a submachine gun from beneath a bouquet of yellow roses, or blithely announcing,”I kill people, dear”: it was HM doing it, too. “I know!” she giggles. “That’s why people loved it, the Americans in particular, because it was the Queen. Isn’t that naughty?”
