Life As A Drama Queen: Helen Mirren
Helen Mirren is used to wearing crowns but her role as Leo Tolstoy’s attention-seeking wife tested her majestic talents.
IT IS peak hour in London and the city is at a standstill, an infuriating, photogenic freeze-frame of red double-decker buses, black cabs and tree-lined Georgian streets shiny in the rain. The Tube’s Central line has succumbed to a signalling failure; I’m in a taxi and, like Alice’s white rabbit, running very, very late.
The woman waiting for me in a hotel suite, Thames side by Tower Bridge, is the Queen, no less. But she is also Prime Suspect’s steely Superintendent Jane Tennyson, the incredible wife in Peter Greenaway’s The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover, Lady Macbeth, Caesonia, third wife of Caligula and myriad other stage, film and TV roles.
I’m late for Dame Helen Mirren and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.
The Mirren I join in the hotel lobby, full of apologies, is suitably regal but also warm and incredibly understanding of the delay. “Don’t worry. I live just up the road when I’m in London,” she says, pointing up the river. “There is a little street of beautiful Georgian houses just behind that blue building there. See, I didn’t come far.”
We take the lift to the suite. It is cold, feels unused and the sofa – when she sits on it – dwarfs her. She is petite, much smaller than I imagined after trawling the net for days, seeing her on the red carpet, winning Oscars, Emmys, Golden Globes, beside strapping leading Hollywood men, papped in a bikini on a beach in Italy looking as tummy-taut and high-breasted as a woman half her 63 years.
The heating is quickly turned on and we start to talk about Italy and Puglia, in the south, where she and her husband, the director Taylor Hackford, are restoring a beautiful old house. Their choice is intriguing because Puglia is a stony, unforgiving place of olive groves, figs and prickly pears, of black, rocky seasides and rural pockets of couldn’t-give-a-damn concrete holiday houses smattered between whitewashed Medieval hilltop towns. Tuscany it is not.
Mirren is quick to admit that it is not classically beautiful but she nails the place’s soul. “I’m not living there yet but you don’t ever feel like you are just visiting, like other very beautiful but touristic places [in Italy],” she says.
“Puglia feels very authentic, rather wonderful. You feel as if you are one with the place. It has this lovely mixture of real, raw countryside kind of thing and the sea. And slums!” she says with a burst of throaty laughter. “We are building a palace in the slums!”
The screen legend chatting on the sofa is dressed not glamorously, but sensibly, for the cold. She is wearing flat pumps, finely cut trousers and a woolly cardigan. Her hair shines white – she has said she still cuts it herself – but it is so, so stylish that seems hard to believe. She wears little make-up, elegant jewellery but nothing showy – and she has a teensy tattoo on the skin between thumb and index finger that screams of a certain risque past.
Just last year, in a candid interview she admitted to a past love for cocaine (she gave it up when she read that the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie had been living in South America from the proceeds of the drug). She also sparked controversy wondering out loud if consensual sex under the influence – then reneged at the last minute – constitutes rape. The comments, which made front pages throughout Britain, revealed either a heartening candour and naivety or a canny talent for creating headlines.
This time, Mirren is on the circuit to promote The Last Station, the story of the last months of Leo Tolstoy’s life. Dame Helen plays Countess Sofya, his wife of 48 years and mother of his 13 children. Christopher Plummer is the old Tolstoy, determined, at the end of his life, to enact his platitude that “the sole meaning of life is to serve humanity”. The film tells the story of Tolstoy’s 11th-hour decision to disinherit his wife and family and will all the rights to his writing to the Russian people.
Dramatised by director Michael Hoffman from the novel by Jay Parini, it is a true story told through the eyes of a neophyte aide played by a brilliant James McAvoy. The youthful observer embarks on his own first love affair while watching, torn, as the writer he worships pursues his ideals but destroys the woman he loves in the process.
Mirren’s Countess Sofya is complex: a devoted wife and muse who copied War and Peace out six times by hand, and a Russian aristocrat infuriated by her husband’s pig-headed devotion to the common good over the economic wellbeing of his own family. She creates a character of great dramatic and comedic intensity, swinging between wild-haired, ferocious histrionics, acerbic, clever in-marriage repartee and an elegant, ageing coquette in flowing white night gown who still knows how to arouse the lust of her septuagenarian consort. Plummer is the husband frayed by the contest between privilege and wealth in his own life and the political ideals of poverty and purity to which he aspires.
Mirren says she knew nothing about Tolstoy’s last year, his family life, wife or children, although she had read him “a long time ago” in her early 30s. “I came to it all pretty ignorant – I am still really … I only know what I read in the script.”
She says she read Parini’s book, found it lots of fun and in retrospect wished that some scenes in the book had made it into the movie.
“There is one where she hides in a trench all night long because she wants to know if Paul Giamatti’s character [the man who pressures Tolstoy not to abandon his ideals in favour of his family] is visiting,” she says. “It is very funny the way it is written in the book because she describes doing this as a very logical and sensible thing to do and you realise it is completely mad and over the top.
“I loved being her. I loved the fact that she doesn’t find her behaviour remotely surprising or out of order … it is just the way she is.”
Despite the countess’s often abhorrent attention-seeking antics, Mirren elicits sympathy for her character, a balance she says was hard to pull off.
“That was very important because if it were just operatic histrionics it would be rather tedious and incredibly boring. I often felt I was going too far or I would find I wasn’t going far enough”.
I ask how she felt about her performance and she pauses: “Aaaahhh. There were a couple of moments when I thought, ‘No, you really blew that, that is just not good enough Helen.’ But, in general, it was um … good. Um, pretty good.”
Is this self-criticism a common response? “Oh yes, absolutely,” she answers without hesitation. “I only generally ever see a piece of work once. Oh, I might watch it again 10 years later if it comes on the television or something, I might get seduced into it again but normally I only watch something once and I have an immediate reaction and it’s very often ‘Oh that was terrible’ or ‘Oh that’s pretty good’ but … I cannot imagine anyone not looking at themselves critically.”
Mirren’s own rather exotic background has some resonance with this latest role as she, too, was the daughter of an educated, fiercely socialist Russian father, although hers was an English, working-class mother. Her paternal grandfather, however, was a Russian nobleman, tsarist colonel and diplomat who was caught in Britain while negotiating an arms deal during the Russian Revolution.
Born Ilyena Vasilievna Mironov and raised in Essex, the second of three children, Mirren was educated in a Catholic girls’ school and began acting there. Later she attended a teaching college and at 18 auditioned for the National Youth Theatre. By 20 she was playing Cleopatra at the Old Vic and had an agent, Al Parker.
Her CV is terrifying: pages and pages long – movies, television, theatre. She laughs that it is embarrassing now so she just asks that programs for stage plays simply say “Helen has worked extensively on stage, films and TV”.
In fact, she has worked constantly since her youth and found success early, playing Shakespeare, including Lady Macbeth, at Stratford, Chekov on the West End and Arthur Miller double bills at the Young Vic, almost all to rave reviews, while still in her 20s. It wasn’t until 1994, however, in a role alongside John Hurt and Joseph Fiennes in Ivan Turgenev’s A Month in the Country, that the big breakthrough came. She went to New York and earned two Tony Award nominations.
Her film pedigree is as eclectic as she is: from the controversial Caligula to The Mosquito Coast to Gosford Park and Calendar Girls. There are scores of art house, budget independent movies as well as the big, commanding movies such as The Queen, which won her a BAFTA and a Golden Globe, as well as the Oscar. Prime Suspect, award-winning and incredibly long-running, is her best-known TV role but she has played many others, including Queen Elizabeth I for the BBC. She says she has deliberately chosen work across all three art forms but recently suffered panic attacks waiting for a decision on a TV pilot in America that would have signed her up for seven years straight.
It didn’t get picked up and she describes “unbelievable relief – I was so dreading it even though it was interesting and good but I would never put myself in that position again.”
Next, she is shooting a movie with Bruce Willis, believe it or not, although there are another two films coming out this year apart from The Last Station, including Love Ranch, the story of a brothel in Las Vegas, co-starring Joe Pesci and directed by her Oscar-winning husband.
Mirren has an infectious laugh and, when asked about her workload, insists she is intrinsically lazy. “I make myself work because I’m incredibly lazy when I don’t work – it’s awful,” she giggles.
I ask if she can imagine retiring and, odd as it might sound, she suddenly exudes a palpable melancholy.
“Oh, I can imagine not working. Yes absolutely. I can see myself saying, ‘That is it.’ At least I hope I can do that in time to have life to live, if you know what I mean. As an actor, you are aware that unemployment is constantly looming. You are always pathetically grateful for anyone asking you to work and you are always frightened to say no because, you know, you think, ‘Maybe it’s the last time that anyone will ever ask me to work,’ and so there is always that little niggling thing at the back of your mind,” she says quietly.
“I think that is why actors very often go on working until they are very ancient, even more ancient than I am, because I think they are constantly frightened. It is just built into your DNA to be fearful of people not asking you to work. Anyway … ” she says, clearly changing the subject.
Another pause, and Mirren explodes in a series of violent sneezes. Eyes runny, nose snotty, the allergic reaction erupts, ironically, just as I ask her if she is sick of being a sex symbol, the pin-up of men young and old and an icon for older women.
She snorts, another sneeze and giant sniff and blows her nose. “This,” she says theatrically, pointing to her nose, runny eyes, tissues, “is the reality. What you see in front of you,” she announces and laughs loudly before answering.
“I don’t know. I both like it and I get bored with it, irritated with it and annoyed … and flattered. Everything you could possibly imagine, really … excuse me!” she says, with another big nose-blow.
“The annoying thing – no, not the annoying thing, the worrying thing – is that you know that if people come to meet you thinking like that or come to see you at work, you know they are going to be disappointed because I’m not like that.”
“I’m not kidding, Paola. You know it’s not a very comfortable thing to have to try and live up to, to be honest. And actually I don’t try and live up to it is the answer.”
I point out to her that, actually, she has managed to straddle the two seemingly impossible roles in her profession: the serious, theatrical, intelligent actor and the bosomy blonde adored by flashbulbs on the red carpet.
“That’s true,” she says after a moment, “but that badge got pinned on to me much earlier on in my career and it used to piss me off when I was much younger. I felt marginalised by it. I did want to be a serious actress – although those words never came out of my mouth. Never. Because I also realised very early on that that sounds pathetic – the ‘Don’t look at my tits I’m a serious actress’ whine.
“I never did that. I never went there. But in my mind, I thought that and felt that, and early on I thought that all you can do is work, work as genuinely and as truthfully as you know how and do the kind of work that interests you and let the work speak for you.
“And over the years, eventually, it will … if you are lucky enough to continue working.”