The Oscar-winning actress, who was born Ilynea Mironov, paid a nostalgic trip to her aristocratic ancestors’ former estate at Kuryanovo, near Smolensk. But when she and her sister arrived they were startled to be confronted by assault rifle-wielding bodyguards.

“It was an incredible experience to walk on the land that my father was born on and where my grandfather lived and which was obviously so dear to his heart,” she recalled. “But it had recently been bought by a young Russian oligarch—a sort of gangster character who turned up with two bodyguards with guns, Kalashnikovs. He said, ‘Welcome of my land.’ I said ‘Welcome to MY land,’” She laughed at the memory. “I think he thought we were going to cause a second revolution and take our land back. Eventually, maybe that will happen.”

In The Last Station the Oscar-winning actress portrays the impassioned Sofya, Tolstoy’s wife of 48 years and the mother of his 13 children, who becomes involved in a ferocious tug of war with the zealous Chertkov over Tolstoy’s estate and legacy which Chertkov believed should be bestowed upon the Russian people while Sofya was determined it should pass to his family.

While they battle, Tolstoy, played by Christopher Plummer, makes a dramatic flight from his home to the tiny rail station at Astapovo, where, too ill to continue, he believes he is dying alone, while more than one hundred newspapermen camp outside awaiting hourly reports on his condition.

Mirren, 64, whose family was thrown off their country estate by the Bolsheviks in 1917, felt an immediate affinity with Sofya. “It’s in my blood,” she said. “My great great grandmother was a Russian countess and one side of my family was Russian aristocracy; the other was English working-class, so I’m a good contradiction.

“This is one of the great women’s roles in film. Sofya is a wonderfully tempestuous and passionate person.” Adapted from Jay Parini’s historical novel, the movie version of The Last Station has been in the works for almost two decades. When the book was published in 1990 Anthony Quinn originally wanted to play Tolstoy but the project became bogged down in script rewrites and false starts. Then when Quinn died in 2001 Anthony Hopkins was interested in the role, with Meryl Streep as Sofya. That didn’t work out so Glenn Close was penciled as the novelist’s spouse.

Finally, with a script by Michael Hoffman, who also directed, and Christopher Plummer as Tolstoy, The Last Station began filming last year in the German regions of Sazony-Anhalt, Brandenburg, Thuringia and Leipzig with a ten million pounds budget raised from half a dozen German and Russian sources.

It was the hit of the Telluride Film Festival this year, where it received a standing ovation. “It’s not documentary, but it’s very, very firmly based on the real story,” said Mirren, who three years ago starred in a BBC radio play based on letters written by her Russian great-aunts and her exiled grandfather’s unpublished memoirs, which she found in his wooden trunk.

“I read about Sofya and read her diaries to a certain extent but in the end I was making the film that Michael wrote and based on the book by Jay Parini. Those were really my inspirations rather than the real person; I felt I had to interpret their work rather than try to recreate Sofya perfectly. The film is all about love—young love and old love. It shows the practicalities and disasters that love can involve. The characters were so wonderful, it was an absolute gift.”

Helen Mirren, looking elegant in a midnight blue dress with mini-boots, was talking in Los Angeles where she and her husband, director Taylor Hackford, have a home as well as one in London. She had just arrived back in California after spending most of the year in London, where she returned to her theatrical roots at the National Theatre in Racine’s 17th-century French tragedy Phaedra. Her return to the stage, which was already one of the most eagerly awaited cultural events of the year, was also one of the most ground-breaking because on June 25 the performance was beamed live to cinemas around the world.

“We got an amazing reaction absolutely incredible, and it really surprised us because we didn’t know how it would be received,” she said. “If you see little clips of theatre on television it never looks very good, but they filmed it very well. We thought real theater buffs would either love it or say, ‘It’s all right but it would be better in the theater.’ “But we got a spectacular response from all over, with people saying it was like being in the theatre. It was incredible.

“The magical thing about it is that you can bring live theatre—well, it’s not live but it’s kind of a live theatre experience—to people all over the world who can’t possibly have an opportunity to fly to London to see it in the theatre, so it was a great, great success.” As for the future of cinema-theatre, she said:

“I know the National Theatre want to keep on doing it but I don’t think it’s the future of theatre generally because the whole point of theatre is that it’s live. It will never replace film and it will never replace live theatre—it’s something in between.

“But I think it’s a fascinating new technology that will obviously get explored further as time goes on.” From the age of 13, when she played Caliban in a production of The Tempest at St. Bernard’s Convent School in Westcliff-on-Sea, Helen Mirren knew she wanted to be an actress. In defiance of her parents’ wishes that she become a teacher, she joined the National Youth Theatre and at the age of 18 she was playing Cleopatra in Anthony and Cleopatra at the Old Vic.

Within two years she had joined the Royal Shakespeare Company. She has played virtually every major woman’s role in the theatre, at the same time establishing herself as an international television and movie star.

She has accumulated three BAFTA awards for her role as Prime Suspect’s Inspector Jane Tennison, two best supporting actress Oscar nominations, for The Madness of George 111 and Gosford Park, winning the best actress Oscar in 2007 for The Queen. Like all theatrical Dames, she has also done her stints on Broadway, in a revival of Turgenev’s A Month In The Country and in 2001 with Ian McKellen in August Strindberg’s Dance of Death.

“About every three or four years I go back to the theatre and do a play and I’ve done that all my life,” she said. “It’s a constant in my life and the reason I go back is because I’m terrified that if I don’t, I’ll lose my nerve, because theatre takes a lot of nerve and you can lose it.

“So I try and test myself again every so often.”

An interview with Taylor Hackford about living with wife Helen Mirren.

The thing that turns me on – as a man and as an artist – is talent. The fact that Helen is a great actress was an important part of my attraction to her. That she’s a very sexy woman wasn’t lost on me either. Our first proper encounter was not exactly what you would call positive. I had seen her before in an experimental performance in California; three or four years later, I called her in for a casting for White Nights with Mikhail Baryshnikov [released in 1985]. I was running late and out getting a sandwich when she arrived. When we got back, she was piping mad. She said, “Are we going to read, or not?” She read beautifully, of course, and got the part; though she certainly wasn’t courteous.

Last year we worked together again, on my film Love Ranch. When she first arrived on set, she had just caught flu. It’s hard when you’re sleeping with someone every night who is hacking and coughing, then you have to ask them to get up and work the next day in sub-freezing temperatures; but she was incredible. My wife is always the leader on-set (not just in my films); to have the star of your film standing there like a rock, delivering in the most brilliant way, is such a gift.

Taking on the role of the Queen in Stephen Frears’s film was an incredibly difficult decision for her. I hadn’t visited her on-set, and hadn’t seen her in the role until the premiere at the Venice film festival. The first image on the screen was the Queen sitting for a portrait, and she’s dressed in all her queenly drag. I was surprised and shocked. I just broke out laughing – and I have a very large laugh. She was saying, “Shhh! Stop it!” Then when I had settled into the film, she leaned over and said, “Darling, will you ever sleep with me again?”

This week, London’s National Theatre makes history with its first live broadcast of a live performance: Phèdre, with Helen Mirren and Dominic Cooper, is being simultaneously beamed out to cinemas in London, the U.K., the rest of Europe, Australia and right here in the New York area. This Thursday, theater fans who can’t afford a plane ticket to London can sit back and enjoy a high-definition broadcast at various locations in the city, including Film Society of Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Director’s Guild Theater, and locations in Connecticut, New Jersey and Washington, D.C. After the jump, enjoy Time Out London’s Caroline McGinn’s exclusive interview with Helen Mirren and the director of the National Theatre, Nicholas Hytner, on a break from rehearsals.

In the cool white light of a rehearsal room at the National Theatre, Helen Mirren chats with Phèdre cast members about the Chelsea Flower Show and TV gardener Alan Titchmarsh who is, apparently, a bit of a sex symbol. The charmingly rumpled middle-aged gardener is indeed the U.K. housewife’s choice. But on the way to the National this morning it was Mirren—not Titchmarsh—who was framed by exotic blooms on the newspaper front pages.

The 62-year-old dame—who hails from Southend-on-Sea and whose family were Pimlico butchers on one side and a tsarist military dynasty on the other—is something of an exotic bloom herself: ice-blond, straight-backed and gracious in a red shawl, she has a reputation for swearing like an Essex girl, but she’s as poised as a white Russian. Everyone gathers around her in a rehearsal room dominated by the stark white planes of Phèdre’s set. Hytner looks relaxed and boyish; it feels as if everyone is enjoying coming down from a morning’s hard work on Racine’s intense tragedy, in which the aging Queen Phèdre becomes obsessed with her stepson Hippolytus (Dominic Cooper). After he rejects her, she accuses him of rape. Their grisly fate is documented in a collage of photocopied illustrations of paintings and poems tacked up on the wall.

Cast and crew ebb away, leaving Mirren and Hytner to do the interview. She remains enthroned in the chair whilst Hytner, in jeans and Converse, perches on the edge of the stage. They’re both deadly serious about their work—the live filming of which is an unprecedented and unpredictable experiment. But they are also wholly comfortable with each other, often cracking up and hooting with laughter at shared memories.

When did you first meet?
Helen Mirren: I don’t remember when we first met, do you?
Nicholas Hytner: I probably remember it better than you. I think I was 12 or 13…
Mirren: Oh don’t, that’s embarrassing! Stop right now.
Hytner: My second cousin is Bruce Myers. I was a snot-nosed schoolkid from Manchester going to Stratford-upon-Avon to see Bruce and that’s when I first saw Helen.
Mirren: Bruce was my boyfriend. I used to live with him and he was with the RSC too. We have strange connections, Nick and I. Nick’s aunt is also a very good friend of mine, she’s a very successful costume designer. Though we’ve only worked together twice—this is the second time.
Hytner: Third time! We did The Madness of King George, remember?
Mirren: Yes, absolutely, on film. Second time in the theater.

You’ve both got a reputation for being strong-willed. Do you fall out?
Hytner: Never.
Mirren: I’m not strong-willed actually. I’m a complete pushover. I love to be told what to do.

How is Phèdre different from your last project together?
Mirren: The last play I did with Nick was Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending. There were often eight or nine people on the set. Here it’s one or two. It’s Peter Brook’s “empty space” in many ways. There are no fancy sets or moving in and out. It’s very dependent on the interior performance. Nick says, “You stand here, you sit there.” He’s brilliant about making a lot of people onstage have focus. This play’s very minimal, more to do with the interior story. I love the way Nick pays so much attention to the people who listen. Often there are two people onstage, one person having a lot to say and the other person listening.
Hytner: With Racine there are great blocks of thought and feeling. The French call them tirades. It’s necessary for the person who is silent to know why they are silent. The great misapprehension is that Racine’s static but it’s emotionally so—
Mirren: Febrile
Hytner: …Febrile. So volatile. It will be interesting to see how it works.

Do you feel scared about simultaneously performing for a cinema audience and a live audience?
Mirren: I do. People often ask me whether I prefer theater or film and the answer is that I prefer the one I’m not doing: The grass is always greener. But here I finally get to do both at the same time. There is no essential difference between them. You’re imaginatively putting yourself into a situation and telling a story. The tools are different. And that’s where the challenge is: finding a tool that can speak to the audience out there but not look weird to the audience out here. My instinct at the moment—because live broadcasts are something the New York Met has done—is to go with the operatic element.
Hytner: These will not be movies. You’re going to see a play broadcast live. It’s the liveness for me that makes the difference. The audience over the country and the world will see Helen in a National Theatre production rather than a Helen Mirren movie.

Do you have to alter the stage movement: more lines delivered to camera?
Hytner: With the actors, we’re paying no attention whatsoever to the filming; it’s not even at the back of or minds now. We will have proper camera rehearsals so we can work out with the video director and cameraman the best way of capturing the experience for a cinema audience. We’re not going to try to make a movie.
Mirren: That’s absolutely important. Otherwise it’s neither fish nor fowl. I’ve always found as an actress that the best thing to do in film or TV or theater is just to lose yourself in it. Think of the story, the character, the worlds we’re in, and forget everything else.

Helen, what was your reaction when the idea of doing Phèdre was first mentioned?
Hytner: It was Helen’s idea.

Why Phèdre?
Mirren: The passion! It’s so fabulously extreme. The form is different. Here you walk on and…tirade! I’d always read about Sarah Bernhardt playing the role, the description of her entrance. What made me want to do this was reading about Bernhardt and those great actresses of the 19th century. I got very romantically caught up in the grandness of that.
Hytner: It’s the part that all serious French actresses have to play. In our theater it’s for an actor, and it’s Hamlet.

Nick, you grew up in Manchester, and Helen, you were born in Essex…. Is it important to you that the National is broadcasting events so much further than the South Bank?
Mirren: I wish it were going to my local town, South End. It’s going to Colchester though, isn’t it? That’s pretty good.
Hytner: It’s going to all sorts of places that aren’t big enough to be toured to. Or internationally—which are too expensive to tour to. It’s great that we’re playing the Zeffirelli’s Digital Cinema in Ambleside. So many theaters have got the right technology now.
Mirren: Of course, pubs do too. Perhaps we should be going out to all the sports pubs? Why not? “Tuesday night, one night only. Forget the f*****g World Cup! Helen Mirren in Phèdre instead.” It would be a very live audience.

Are you nervous about how it will be received internationally, in places like Croatia, the Netherlands and Australia?
Mirren: It’s fantastic that there’s an appetite for that. I hope that, vice versa, there would be an appetite in Britain to see Croatian theater. We so rarely get the opportunity of seeing it.
Hytner: If this works, it could start a whole movement of exchange. Our biggest audience is in Anglophone countries, but I’ve been surprised by how many non-English-speaking countries have wanted it. There’s an audience here who’d want to see European theater too.
Mirren: There’s amazing theater in Georgia, Russia, Sweden. It would be wonderful to see that here in London too.

Phèdre is a very intense role: a woman in the grip of an erotic breakdown. Is it hard to leave her in the rehearsal room?
Mirren: It’s very easy to lose her. I go home, watch Nothing to Declare on TV, which I absolutely love. It’s a reality show about immigration and customs in Australia. It’s fabulous. The perfect Phèdre antidote. No, I don’t take Phèdre home. I do take the script home because I’m relentlessly trying to get the stuff into my head. I don’t think I learn lines easily. It’s a painful process. The language is great in the mouth.

Is the language sexy?
Hytner: Not quite.
Mirren: The byproduct is that it’s sexy. It’s visceral hard, driving. Full of Ted Hughesian energy.
Hytner: Hughes said he wanted it to be like a pane of glass. Racine has a grace and formality which this does not have. It takes you a while to uncover why it’s rhythmically so precise. You realize there’s not a misplaced syllable. It’s refined steel.

Is there chemistry between you and Dominic Cooper?
Hytner: They only have one scene together!
Mirren: And he finds me so utterly repulsive in the scene that he’s practically: “Bleurgh, bleaurghh” vomiting all over me.
Hytner: If there were chemistry, there would be no play.
Mirren: Yes, it would fall apart. I’ll say one thing which will sound like thespian blather: Dominic’s the most delightful person. Funny, kind, no vanity, hard-working. I love him.

Were your female friends jealous about you acting with him?
Mirren: It was more my male actor friends who said he’s fabulous.

Do people stop you on the street a lot? What sort of things do they ask you?
Mirren: Sure, people stop me. Not a lot. When I’m rehearsing I can usually scurry through front of house quite happily. When people approach me, they usually say lovely things. They’re most surprised when they see me in the [toilet paper rolls] section at the supermarket trying to work out which is the cheapest. Very carefully. Studying. Three at £2.95 or 2 at £2.05. Which is the cheapest?
Hytner: I’m really pathetic about sell-by dates.
Mirren: I just go for the cheap things.

The National Theatre broadcast of Phèdre will take place at various venues on Thusday 25 and other dates. Details on local venues here.

When were you happiest?
I remember thinking, when I was in my early 30s, that this is the best age to be, and I still believe your 30s are a wonderful time. But I think I am pretty happy now.

What is your greatest fear?
I am afraid in aeroplanes.

What is your earliest memory?
The smell of chocolate. I was in Germany where my father was on business. I was about three or four and at that time, in postwar Britain, I had never had chocolate.

Which living person do you most admire, and why?
At the moment, Camilla Batman-Ghelidja is someone I deeply admire.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
My procrastination and my intrinsic laziness.

What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Mean-spiritedness.

Aside from a property, what’s the most expensive thing you’ve bought?
I suppose a car, but I don’t buy expensive things. I’ve never bought a new car, and I haven’t actually bought one for 15 years.

What is your most treasured possession?
A little, gold-leafed, wooden Buddha.

Where would you like to live?
I like the way I live, which is between many different places.

What would your super power be?
The ability to eat absolutely anything and never get fat.

What makes you depressed?
In a nutshell, Sarah Palin.

What do you most dislike about your appearance?
I am not too keen on my nose, I don’t like my knees, I hate my ankles, I am unsure about my behind, I don’t like my legs at all. I am not too sure about my chin, my forehead is a bit dodgy. But, overall, I can live with it.

If you could bring something extinct back to life, what would you choose?
There are so many beautiful animals that share this planet with us that we are about to lose and must save.

Who would play you in the film of your life?
I often find myself in movies where they need to get a younger me, because I am too old to play the younger me. I recently met a fabulous young actor called Jessica Chastain who will be playing the younger me in The Debt.

What is your most unappealing habit?
Not answering phone calls. I think it’s because I’ve a slight phone phobia.

What is your favourite smell?
Newly mown grass is lovely, as long as it doesn’t come with the drone of the electric mower.

What is your favourite book?
My favourite book, like my favourite role, is the one I happen to be doing at the time.

What would be your fancy dress costume of choice?
I do love fancy dress and I love Mardi Gras in New Orleans – I’d wear something sparkly with a pink wig.

What is the worst thing anyone’s said to you?
Many years ago I had a funny experience in a lift at the BBC rehearsal rooms. Something I’d been in had just been on television and there were two people discussing it. They didn’t realise I was who I was. One said, ‘What did you think of that thing last night?’ And the other said, ‘I thought it was quite good, but she was terrible.’

What is your guiltiest pleasure?
I adore Project Runway and I am a bit partial to America’s Next Top Model.

What do you owe your parents?
I was very lucky, I had wonderful parents living in an insignificant dormitory town, in a lower-middle-class/working-class environment, who gave me everything. Mostly what they gave me was love.

What is the worst job you’ve done?
Working in a department store.

What single thing would improve the quality of your life?
To be able to tele-transport from one country to another.

What do you consider your greatest achievement?
To still be working!