Actress Dame Helen Mirren has lived a life worthy of her hero, William Shakespeare.
When Dame Helen Mirren was a girl and still known as Ilyena she would sit in her grandfather’s room and listen to stories of his life in Russia. Pyotr Mironov lived with Mirren, her brother, sister and her parents in their small home in Leigh-on-Sea. She loved him, found him fascinating, but thinks now that he was in constant psychological pain.
Prominent in the military, Mironov had married into the aristocracy, coming to London with his wife and children in 1916 to buy weapons from the British. While he was away the Bolshevik revolution took place and Mironov found himself cut off from his homeland. To support his family he became a taxi driver, his mind filled with London streets, and yet his heart remained in Russia. He had pictures of the executed tzar and tzarina on his wall and kept pre-revolutionary roubles in a drawer. Mirren remembers him drawing a map of his estate, complete with stables, servants’ quarters and an orchard.
It must have been odd growing up as a working-class Essex girl and feeling that this was not the life you were supposed to be living. For a fledgling actress it was, perhaps, a formative lesson in transformation. “We had been an upper middle-class intelligentsia bourgeois family, but with a very fine and proud military history,” Mirren says. “In fact my great-great-great-grandfather is mentioned in War And Peace. He fought, not very well, in the Napoleonic wars.”
How fitting that Mirren has spent her career bringing fiction to life; her entire family history seems to have been shaped by the opposite impulse – life aspiring to the condition of fiction. There was the ancestor immortalised by Tolstoy, another great-grandparent who was butcher to Queen Victoria, and a beautiful aunt who married an East End villain. Speaking about photographs of her grandfather as a young man lounging on a troika, she says: “They’re like something out of Chekhov.”
We are talking in a Covent Garden hotel on a bitterly cold day. Mirren, used to the heat of her adopted city, Los Angeles, has wrapped herself in a black coat and is wearing grey fingerless gloves. Her whitey-blonde hair falls upon the scarves coiled round her neck. Though physically slight, she has undeniable presence, a weight of personality that tips all the attention in the room towards her.
She is in London, where she has a second home, to discuss her memoir, In The Frame: My Life In Words And Pictures. The book arrives with a powerful tail-wind; Mirren is the most acclaimed performer in the world right now, having won so many awards in the last year, including a best actress Oscar for The Queen, that she surely hasn’t room on the mantelpiece to rest her feet. A few days before this interview, she received an Emmy, her fourth, for the last ever Prime Suspect.
Mirren has reached the highest level of her profession. Did awareness of her family’s former glory make her ambitious? “Oh, I don’t think that, no,” she frowns. “It led to a slight feeling of specialness. Not superiority, but we were not like most British people at that time. Foreign names were not nearly so common as now. We stuck out like a sore thumb.”
Her father, Vasiliy Mironov, was three when he arrived in London. Keen to assimilate, he eventually anglicised the family name. He was a professional musician, a viola player, but the depression and the second world war put an end to that; he went into his father’s trade, becoming a cabbie to make ends meet.
Just as she had understood her grandfather’s painful nostalgia, Mirren could sense her father’s thwarted creativity. Yet this did not spur her on to live an artistic life. “That was a question of nature rather than nurture. I certainly wasn’t encouraged to be an artist. My parents, having been young and poor in the 1930s, wanted their children to have economic security above all.” When she told her mother she would like to be an actress, Mirren was dismissed as a silly fantasist.
Art, however, was just too seductive. Literally so. As a teenager, Mirren slept with a self-portrait by the Spanish artist Goya beneath her pillow. “I thought he was so sexy and absolutely loved his paintings. I felt that somehow we were going to be together.”
Born in 1945, Mirren was an insular child with a horror of school playtimes; she couldn’t stand competitive games, or the more insidious competition of trying to be part of the in-crowd, and has retained these loner tendencies. “Actors are not extroverted people,” she explains. “An awful lot are extremely introverted, paralytically shy, and it’s acting that liberates them because they don’t have to be themselves.”
Is that why she does it? “In the early days, yes, very much so. I think it was that feeling of incredible, ugh, just awful embarrassment about anything to do with myself and my bodily functions, plus a dreamy desire not to be in a suburban dormitory town on the edge of England. The world of theatre and film allowed me to go into such fabulous, imaginative, dramatic worlds. You can live in them for a time and it’s great. It’s like having a wonderful dream where you actually are the Queen.”
Mirren certainly has a regal bearing. Those who have known her since youth say she has always had a certain hauteur. This should not be confused with snootiness; if she seems aloof, perhaps it is because her immigrant background caused her to grow up feeling like an outsider and because she is naturally timid. For her, acting is not about attention-seeking, but rather burying herself beneath other selves.
After moving to London she joined the National Youth Theatre, making a splash in 1965 with her portrayal of Cleopatra. From there she auditioned successfully for the Royal Shakespeare Company. According to Trevor Nunn, Mirren was asked to join the RSC because the audition panel found her attractive. Indeed it wasn’t long before the national press were calling her the sex queen of Stratford. This reputation has stuck. It is part of her public persona that she is never happier than when stripping for a role.
Ironically, she seems for a long time to have been seriously uneasy about her appearance, finding it unsettling to exude palpable sexuality at a time when, off stage, she would have preferred not to be noticed at all. “It’s so confusing for a young woman of 17, 18,” she says. “You feel your physical power over men and it’s very heady because you’re not used to the idea of women having any power whatsoever; especially in those days because it was slightly pre-feminism. Then you find you have this power that has nothing to do with your thought, your energy, or anything you are doing. It is simply the way you look. Men behave like idiots around you sometimes, and it can go to your head. You sort of fall in love with yourself and that feeling of power.
“On the other hand it’s incredibly limiting and insulting. You are no longer a human being with thoughts and feelings and an imagination but simply a physical object. It is so imprisoning.”
Her ambivalence towards her own sexuality must have been exacerbated, too, by some awfulness that took place when she moved to London. In an interview four years ago she said she had been date-raped several times. Now she writes: “I felt worthless and shamed, and became suspicious, hurt and angry, until I found someone who really cared for me.”
This was the Scottish actor Kenneth Cranham, the first man with whom Mirren had a serious relationship. There were only a few others. Until 1983, when she met her future husband, the American film director Taylor Hackford, she was a serial monogamist.
In the late 1970s she had a four-year relationship with the photographer James Wedge, and some of the pictures they made together are reproduced in her book. In one she is naked but for a pair of elbow-length gloves and a sheet of black gauze. “My time with James was one of the best times in my life because he was so creative,” she recalls. “He was very into erotic photography of the Helmut Newton school. We did the kind of work that we wanted to see in magazines, but we knew we’d never sell. We got off on each other and ideas about photography. I was very happy to be his model, or his muse if you like.”
Why has her relationship with Hackford lasted when the others didn’t? “We came into contact at the right time,” she replies. “I have often said to him, Oh, I wish I had known you when I was 24. Why didn’t I know you then?’ And he always says very wisely and truthfully, We wouldn’t be together if we had met when we were 24. We were too busy doing other things.’ He’d had a very different trajectory in relationships to mine. He’d been married twice and I had never been married. I’d had relationships in which I might as well have been, I just sensibly hadn’t actually tied the knot.”
Mirren had been put off marriage and children by her mother, Kathleen, who always stressed the importance of economic and emotional independence. “I don’t think she enjoyed being a mother … I think she felt trapped by her family.” Mirren and Hackford married in 1997. “He’s definitely the most influential person in my life,” she says. “He’s also the hardest person. The other guys were much easier to be with than Taylor.”
Hackford, she says, is turbulent, confrontational and irrational. He sounds, in fact, not unlike her late mother. “He’s more demanding, he’s more difficult in many, many ways than any of my other guys have been,” says Mirren. “But I like that challenge.”
Back in the late 1960s, while living in Stratford and working at the RSC, Mirren began hanging out at a shared house, a hippy bacchanal pad known as Parsenn Sally. Was it good to be finally living the bohemian dream? “It was,” she says, “but it was fraught too because there was a lot of dope being smoked in that environment, and although it was a bohemian dream it was also intensively competitive. There were lethal games of backgammon, and you had to be verbally really fast-witted. I was never up to speed.”
She removes her gloves, revealing a small tattoo on her left hand. “So it was fraught with paranoia and fears, and also I was struggling with self-criticism and my desires as an actress. It wasn’t just” – she mimes puffing a joint – “Oh wow, man, this is cool.’ Far from it. I was rehearsing all day and performing all night as well.”
Marijuana never agreed with her and she eventually gave it up because she worried that it might affect her acting. Mirren was obsessed with Shakespeare. She saw herself as making an important contribution to British culture and society – “Theatre was my religion and I wanted to serve it.”
However, she wasn’t happy with the parts she was playing, so there was a great deal of professional anxiety, mixed with relationship worries and uneasiness about her appearance. By the age of 23, she had worked herself into such a state that she made an appointment with a psychologist. “This lovely old man with this really soft voice and a really dense Scottish accent. I couldn’t understand a word.”
She went to see him because she had begun to despair of ever getting anything she desired in life. “I wanted to be a great actress, and I wanted a roof over my head, and to be able to pay the bills,” she says. “It’s fear of the unknown, isn’t it? I didn’t know myself so I was frightened of myself. I didn’t know who I was, or what I was, or if anyone would ever love me. It’s a scary place in your 20s. That’s when reality hits you. If you don’t have a trust fund tucked away that’s going to pay your bills, it’s bloody scary.”
She developed what sounds like obsessive-compulsive disorder. “I cried all the time. I couldn’t walk down the middle of a pavement. I used to have to walk along holding the wall. I got myself into a whole thing. I couldn’t touch metal. I started going totally stupid really. Just silly.” She is cross at herself even now. “I don’t have a great deal of patience for self-invented neurosis. I find it boring and was deep into it at that time.”
How did she get out of it? “I was recommended a … what’s it called? Not a voyeur. You know, a fella who looks into the future.” It was a palm-reader. He studied her hand and told her to write down everything he predicted. “He spoke so fast and I came out with a sheaf of papers this big” – she holds her hands a foot apart – “with my whole life, my whole future written down.”
Standing outside the palm-reader’s house, she found she had already forgotten almost everything he had said. “And I looked at the paper, and thought, F*** that. I don’t want to know what’s going to happen. I’m just going to go for it and see what happens.’ So I found the nearest rubbish bin and stuffed it in and walked off with my head somehow cleared.”
She was very driven and felt in profound competition with other actresses. “Jealousy can concentrate the mind in a wonderful way.” She began to rack up significant theatre, film and television work. In 1980 she was at The Roundhouse, playing the lead in The Duchess Of Malfi. One night, 20 minutes before the production began, her mother phoned to say that her father had died. Mirren fell to the floor in shock and grief and yet, incredibly, went ahead with the evening’s performance.
“I spent the whole play in tears,” she says. “I walked on stage and was weeping from the beginning to the end, and I went through it like an automaton. Because to act you have to get yourself out of your own mind and into this imaginative world, and I felt that to do that was a terrible betrayal of my father. I just didn’t want to forget him. It was a strange, strange feeling and to this day I think that it was a betrayal to even attempt to act.”
She had a similar experience in 2002 while making Calendar Girls, all the time aware that in the Philippines her brother Peter was dying of cancer. She spent each morning before filming on the phone to doctors in Manila and to her declining brother, then went on set and did her work. When Peter died she put her tears to use in a funeral scene.
Is acting then, for her, a refuge from the darknesses of life? “No, it’s not. If anything, you go further into those things.”
Last year, having made Elizabeth I, The Queen and Prime Suspect one after the other, Mirren experienced a new sensation – she wasn’t sure she ever wanted to work again. Since then, however, she has appeared in two lightweight films that weren’t at all emotionally draining, and signed on for the movie version of Paul Abbott’s television thriller State Of Play. She is in talks to appear in the National Theatre’s Phaedra, and still hopes to one day play Prospero on stage.
For most of her life she has yearned and worked for those things – creative satisfaction and horizons beyond Britain – which her parents found frustratingly elusive. Now, at the age of 62, Dame Helen Mirren, the artist formerly known as The Queen, is abdicating her position of intense artistic seriousness. “Acting doesn’t have to be a demanding, difficult, self-challenging thing,” she smiles. “You can have fun with it as well.”