All at Simply Helen would like to wish Helen a very happy, relaxing 64th birthday. We send lots of love on this special day =)

Oscar-winning actor Helen Mirren is to return to the stage of the National Theatre to play the title role in Racine’s Phèdre next year.

Mirren, who won an Oscar for her performance in Stephen Frears’s 2006 film The Queen, will be directed by Nicholas Hytner, the National Theatre’s artistic director, next June.

The production will co-star Margaret Tyzack as the nurse Oenone – the veteran actor who has recently charmed audiences with her performance in Enid Bagnold’s The Chalk Garden at the Donmar Warehouse, London.

Mirren last performed at the National Theatre in 2004 to great acclaim, in Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra.

Racine’s Phèdre, premiered in 1677, is based on Euripides’s play Hippolytus. It relates the story of the fatal, illicit love that Queen Phèdre nurses for her stepston, Hippolyte.

More news from the National Theatre in tomorrow’s newspaper.

All at Simply Helen would like to wish Helen a very happy, love filled 63rd birthday.

You may remember Helen’s involvement in Oxfam’s “Unwrapped” campaign, last autumn/winter. The aim of the campaign was to “speak out against rubbish presents” targeted at the Christmas shoppers, it was a tongue-in-cheek parody highlighing our societies mindlessness when buying others gifts at times like Christmas, giving presents that people don’t really want or need. Instead Oxfam wanted you to buy something more worthy, giving vital equipment and help to those less fortunate than us.

Last year, here at Simply Helen we launched our “Merchandise” store. All proceeds from this store go to Oxfam, so if you want to give Helen a birthday present, why not head over to our store and pick up one of our pieces safe in the knowledge that you are not only giving Helen a present she would appreciate but also to those across the world that need our help most. You get to keep the cool Mirren-themed apparel and Helen gets the “spiritual gift” of a donation made to charity in her honour.

Thank you to those of you who have supported our “little” charity fundraiser so far. And also a big thank you to Helen for inspiring us to do something “that matters!”

If you haven’t noticed Simply Helen has a new look (hope you like!). I’ve installed a new news system, which won’t mean much to you guys in technical terms but to me your admin its a huge improvement, the old one was unreliable and difficult to customise. Whereas now updating is an absolute dream and hopefully you’ll find it easier to navigate and use. I’m in the process of moving all the old news entries across to the system so bear with me. Please let me know your thoughts on the new look, by leaving a comment =)

The gallery has also undergone a makeover, click here. The gallery is regularly updated with new pictures of Helen so make sure you add it to your favourites, its the largest Helen Mirren gallery on the internet so if your looking for a particular picture you can place a pretty hefty bet on finding it there. If not let me know and I’ll do my best to find it for you!

Sure, Paris can pull off a miniskirt and Scarlett can rock short shorts. But you don’t have to be in your 20s to be hot in Hollywood.

Some might say that no one does a plunging V-neck justice like 61-year-old Helen Mirren.

Mirren, who was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar today, is one of many aging Hollywood heavyweights proving that sex symbol status isn’t just for kids. With a nod from the Academy under her belt, Mirren’s at the top of her profession and still winning red carpet raves for her sexy, yet classic style.

And she’s in good company: along with fellow Oscar nominees Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood, a generation of older stars are redefining what it means to be seductive and successful.

On the red carpet, Mirren, Streep and their peers, including Sophia Loren, Susan Sarandon and Candice Bergen, dazzle in couture gowns and flawless hair and makeup. But with these icons, unlike their younger counterparts, sex appeal isn’t just about designer dresses and Stairmaster-toned thighs.

“There’s something incredibly sexy about a Helen or Meryl who are the antidote to the Britney’s and Paris’ —they are people of real substance and drive,” said Michael Musto, long-time gossip columnist and author of the new book, “La Dolce Musto.”
The ‘Silver Foxes’ Score

While pretty young things come and go, the screen’s senior sirens survive because of their talent.

“A lot of the younger counterparts are going to fall by the wayside,” Musto said. “These are women who’ve survived, so therefore, they exude a sense of accomplishment. They wouldn’t still be there if it was a matter of looks. They’ve got real talent.”

The older actresses can command attention and acclaim. After years of seeing younger starlets walk off with Oscar hardware, Mirren is the odds-on favourite to win for Best Actress for her headlining role in “The Queen.”

“This year, they’re not just emblems of class — Helen Mirren is a lock to win… It’s the biggest lock since Mother Theresa’s chastity belt,” Musto said. “Best Actress has traditionally become an award for younger people — Reese Witherspoon, Hilary Swank, et cetera. This is a great stride where the Academy is finally not afraid to pick someone of substance.”

Clark Collis, a senior writer at Entertainment Weekly who recently interviewed Mirren, Streep and Judy Dench, believes Streep’s role in “The Devil Wears Prada” and Mirren’s in “The Queen” show that the industry is willing to cast older actresses in key parts.

“In an earlier age, once an actress passed 40 there was a sense that they moved into character parts. Both ‘The Queen’ and ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ are character parts, but clearly both of those actresses are capable of being very attractive on screen,” he said. “It’s the first time in a while that people have had the ‘silver foxes’ in these kind of roles.”

Of course, in today’s celebrity culture, appearance reigns supreme, even if function trumps form. Mirren, for one, doesn’t let chronology hinder her appeal.

Musto says Mirren has played her cards right on the red carpet this year, appearing in a series of low-cut yet tasteful gowns.

“She shows cleavage and I think that’s a smart move. She’s winning all these awards for playing a stuffy, buttoned-down Queen Elizabeth, and she’s anxious to show the world who she really is, so she comes off classy, but not too sexy,” he said.

Contrary to the celebrity trend of nipping, tucking and lifting every bit of unwanted skin, Hollywood’s older sex symbols may be better off avoiding the knife.

“There’s certainly a sexiness and an attractiveness in being comfortable in your skin — the skin that’s still in the same region of your body as it was when you started out,” Collis said.

By not overhauling their time-worn facades, the “silver foxes” retain the features that made them appealing in the first place. They stand out from the pack of aging celebrities desperate to look younger.

As for surgery, there’s no way to know which of the older stars have taken the plunge, and they’re certainly not telling. But Musto said whatever they’ve done, it’s not major.

“They haven’t tampered with their looks in a way that makes them unnatural,” he said. “It’s a way to remain individual. Everyone who’s had surgery seems to go to the same doctor, or at least it looks that way.”
Starlets, Take a Cue

What do Hollywood’s older sex symbols have that many younger stars do not? Private lives, for one.

While it might be fun for young stars to see themselves splashed across the cover of supermarket tabloids, that fleeting public fancy doesn’t necessarily bode well for career longevity.

“We don’t know an awful lot about their private lives. Meryl Streep was never photographed bar hopping through Hollywood,” Collis said. “One does wonder if that mystique contributes to their attractiveness and their ability to retain it.”

But not every member of Hollywood’s younger generation is tabloid trash.

Entertainment Weekly’s Collis pointed out three young women poised to become senior sex symbols: Emily Blunt, who recently won a Golden Globe for the TV movie “Gideon’s Daughter”; Rachel Weisz, who has made the transition from arm-candy roles to serious parts; and Reese Witherspoon, whose role in “Walk the Line” won her the Best Actress Oscar last year.

As for the actors and actresses splashed across tabloid covers on a weekly basis, Musto advised they take a cue from the grand dames of the Hollywood game.

“Learn to say ‘no’ to certain things. You don’t have to do every role that’s offered, you don’t have to attend every party you’re invited to,” he said. “You don’t see Helen and Meryl running around at 3 a.m. Pace yourself, worry about your health and make some cautious career choices — don’t just do whatever’s offered to you because you’re hot.”

Helen Mirren has such a strong physical presence that it’s hard to isolate her voice from the rest of her acting. The unconventionality of her jutting nose makes her gorgeously proud, and her alert face even more beautiful; her body is all business, whatever the business at hand.

Yet when you hear her voice on the phone from Los Angeles, her personality comes across in every sound she makes, from the zesty, womanly curiosity of her “Oh, really?” or “That’s very interesting” to the declarative romance of “I love that.”

Jeremy Irons put it best when he told The New Yorker’s John Lahr that “she’s alluring to men” because “she is the complete antithesis of the vapid.”

On the phone, she’s all there. It isn’t just that she means everything she says, but that she isn’t afraid to say anything she means, and she has the powers of articulation and nuance to make it instantly understandable. Her effortless control of volume, mood, range and inflection register as heightened naturalness. You know how some of the best movies, plays and TV shows are like real life, only more so? Interviewing Mirren is like talking to a real person, only more so.

She’s calling to promote Stephen Frears’ superb The Queen (opening tomorrow in Baltimore), in which she pulls off a virtuoso turn in an atypical role. She plays Queen Elizabeth II, and the movie follows her after Princess Diana’s death, when she was seen as the protector of hollow formality because she failed to react with precedent-breaking extravagance and immediacy to the public outpouring of grief for “the people’s princess.”

Even the offhandedly brave Mirren admits it was a huge leap for her to take on the queen. Because “as an actor” Mirren’s “whole world has to do with imagination,” she says “if the queen has a fault, I think it’s that she does have a lack of imagination. But in a way that’s what’s kept her steady and secure in herself.” And what fills that imagination gap? A sense of history? “Absolutely. I think people really underestimate that sense within the kind of vibrant, active, present monarchy that the British have.”

Fans of Mirren’s will see her performance as an even bigger feat than she does. Here she’s playing the most buttoned-up character imaginable. But from the start, she’s been the intellectual’s sex symbol. She tore into spectacular roles and often doffed her clothes on British stages from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, playing Cressida in Troilus and Cressida, Lady Macbeth in Macbeth, Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra, as well as contemporary parts like a rock chanteuse in David Hare’s Teeth and Smiles and other non-Shakespearean classics, such as Nina in The Seagull.

In her first great movie role as a tough, smart, sensual moll in the British gangster film The Long Good Friday (1980), she went toe-to-toe with Bob Hoskins, creating a woman who controlled her big shot’s detonations and even, in a wrestling feint, fought him to a standstill. As the sexy-treacherous sorceress Morgana in Excalibur (1981), she did the same kind of thing to Nicol Williamson’s Merlin.

A decade later, as London’s Detective Superintendent Jane Tennison in PBS’ Prime Suspect series (the final edition airs this fall), Mirren inspired women and enthralled men with her portrayal of a character uniting instinct and intelligence, vulnerability and iron will, humour and obsession, as she fought crime and patriarchy. Mirren has said Tennison is the one character she doesn’t have to pre-think at all.

Character Study

Generally, both Mirren and Michael Sheen, who plays Tony Blair in The Queen, research their characters assiduously, then leave the research at the stage or soundstage door. Sheen and Mirren got to play together in a pleasurable pressure cooker, shooting their two pivotal scenes in just two days. Sheen says of her: “You can’t play the queen without guts and courage and chutzpah. But Helen also has the steel.”

Mirren, 61, started this century doing splendid supporting parts in Robert Altman’s Gosford Park and Fred Schepisi’s Last Orders and is now on a major roll. She’s moved from giving expression to a monarch’s “cruel passions” with a throaty roar as the title character in HBO’s Elizabeth I, to painting an audio picture of centred authority with peerless enunciation as Elizabeth II. When you speak to Mirren, you realize how all her characters’ qualities are contained in her own emotional sound-spectrum; in a single sentence she can rove from delight and hushed intimacy to salty directness and irony.

Her mother, a butcher’s daughter married to a Russian-émigré viola player and cab driver (he also was a driving-test examiner), paid for her to get elocution lessons as a child, and she must have consumed their wisdom and moved on early. Neither those lessons nor her years at England’s National Youth Theatre and the Old Vic and the Royal Shakespeare Company have straitened her spontaneity. (She also logged time in Peter Brooks’ avant-garde ensemble.)

She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Taylor Hackford – who most recently directed Jamie Foxx’s Oscar-winning performance as Ray Charles in Ray. Like Mirren in her current role, Foxx faced the challenge of playing a public personage. “Obviously I had witnessed the amount of work and the extraordinary nature of Jamie’s work first-hand and” – a sort of subterranean rumble enters Mirren’s voice – “had just been so blown away by it.”

With a tinge of rueful laughter she concludes, “I suspect maybe I thought, ‘You’ve really got to try hard, Helen,’ as he did on Ray.” Mirren says what Foxx did as Charles was more difficult than what she did as the queen: “He had to be blind, he had to mime songs, he had to know how to play the piano, he had a far more difficult technical thing to achieve. And the work he did was absolutely prodigious.”

What Mirren does as Queen Elizabeth is pretty prodigious also, and may win her the Oscar, too. Sheen says, “Helen as a person is open, warm, friendly, with a wicked sense of humour. She’s a remarkably attractive woman. But she’d enter her trailer looking like Helen and leave it looking like the queen.”

Gloss-free

The transformation was psychological and spiritual as well as physical. She had to contain her enormous performing vitality in a depiction of sublimated energy. She had to wring many colours from a woman who wore the drabbest coats. She had to learn the value and honour – and price – of aristocratic heritage, and be able to convey stately wisdom. And she succeeds. You can tell why the film’s Mrs. Tony Blair accuses the prime minister of having a crush on the queen. Mirren makes regal competence seductive. Sheen, her Blair, agrees. “There is a sort of nonsexual romance between them,” he says on the phone from a promotional stop in Dallas.

Mirren says the first step toward reclaiming the queen as a character was “to separate our prejudices about the institution from the person, and it’s very difficult to do that, because she is the institution.” Mirren sought “what would have been true to her personality if she’d been a checkout girl at a supermarket when young, as opposed to what she became as a queen.”

During her research, Mirren kept going back to Elizabeth’s youth “for very good actors’ reasons. She wasn’t born to be queen [that only became her destiny after her uncle, King Edward VIII, abdicated the throne], so there you see the real personality that was her with or without the mantle of monarchy.”

And Mirren found to her delight that in Elizabeth, nature and nurture coincided. “If one believes in the monarchy, we got terribly lucky, very, very lucky. Even as a young person – such an incredible sense of responsibility.”

If Mirren says the Brits are lucky in having Elizabeth as their queen, Sheen says the queen is lucky in having Helen Mirren play her.

“She has real courage and complete control. Some actors have this recklessness, this risk-taking, but they don’t have discipline. … That’s why she’s able to give you these glints of the queen’s humour, mischief and ability to read people. It’s Helen’s having all these things together – intuition, courage, risk-taking, and discipline.”