Waves of anxiety wash over me as I stand in the lobby of the The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. I am supposed to be meeting Dame Helen Mirren, Oscar winner, Emmy winner and all-round doyenne of stage and screen, so I can lead her to our table at the hotel restaurant. It has been closed for lunch for several weeks but the hotel management has agreed to make an exception for us and open it, which is the sort of thing that only happens in Hollywood when your dining companion is an A-list star.
The only problem is that the restaurant is empty and I cannot find any staff so I face explaining to Mirren that we have to go elsewhere. As the minutes tick by I begin to devise an – admittedly stupid – alternative plan that involves me taking the current holder of the best actress Oscar to the Taco Bell a few blocks from the hotel. Fortunately, the restaurant manager appears. A picture of calm, he assures me our table is ready and that everything is under control. Seconds later, Mirren glides into the hotel.
She is tanned with silvery blonde hair, wearing what she later tells me is a guipure lace jacket over a white dress. A silver heart-shaped pendant hangs around her neck. None of the other hotel guests bats an eye at her arrival, which is surprising, because Mirren is the closest thing there is to Hollywood royalty, not least because of her recent choice of roles. She won the Oscar this year for her memorable portrayal of Elizabeth II in Stephen Frears’ The Queen, wowed the critics as Elizabeth I in the HBO film of the same name, and, more recently, won an Emmy for her performance as Detective Superintendent Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect 7: The Final Act.
We walk up a flight of stairs into the empty restaurant. Mirren chooses a table and we sit down. She is tired because she got up at 5.30am to fly back from Las Vegas, having spent most of the weekend watching Cirque du Soleil shows. She went with her husband, the director Taylor Hackford, and has been going to the city for years, mainly to watch boxing. She doesn’t gamble, though. “I’m so bad I don’t even know how to work the one-arm bandit.”
The Hollywood Roosevelt, steeped in history, is a fitting venue for lunch with an Oscar winner. The first Academy Awards were held there in 1929, when around 250 people paid $10 to attend a banquet hosted by Douglas Fairbanks. Mirren lives nearby, dividing her time between Los Angeles and her other home in London.
We start talking about Mirren’s autobiography, In the Frame, which has just been published in the UK. She was inspired to write it after opening an old trunk and discovering a treasure trove of letters and pictures.
A waiter comes to our table. “I know exactly what I want: a chopped vegetable salad,” says Mirren, looking up and smiling. I choose something called a tuna takaki. I don’t know what it is, but it sounds interesting.
The book charts her life from her upbringing in Leigh-on-Sea in Essex, to her discovery of acting and the theatre. It also reveals how her paternal grandfather, Pyotr Vassili Mironov, came to England from Russia. The son of a countess and a member of the Czarist army, Mironov and his family moved to London in 1916 where they enjoyed an affluent life. That came to an end when the Bolsheviks swept to power in Russia, leaving the family stranded in England. Without money or means, Mironov became a cab driver.
His son, Mirren’s father, was born in Russia but grew up in England determined to assimilate. He anglicised his surname, changing it to Mirren and speaking English wherever possible “much to the chagrin of his father”, says Mirren. “It became very contentious: my grandfather would talk to him in Russian and my dad would answer him in English.”
Her father also took part in the 1936 demonstrations against Oswald Mosley’s fascists in the East End of London. “He was extremely leftwing, and, of course, that was an anathema to my grandfather because it was the leftwing socialists who had taken his land away.” She says her father became very disaffected with Bolshevism when the truth about Stalin’s reign emerged in the 1960s. So you grew up in a politicised family, I say. “Yes, very much so.” She chews her bread. “Anti-royalist. Anti-monarchist. What they would have made of The Queen and me in it, I don’t know. But, you know, one doesn’t remain fixed in anything. We all change as we grow up and grow older.”
Debate in the Mirren household was encouraged. “The discussion in my family was always open, and we were all free to be what we wanted to be. The only thing my mother always said to me was: ‘For God’s sake, don’t get religion.’” Her own political views, she says, are like her mother’s. “I have a slight feeling that [politicians] are all bastards in the end. To be successful in politics you have to be a compromiser and you have to lie.”
The food arrives. I look at my plate. Thick, small pieces of raw, seasoned tuna are arranged on it like the spokes of a wheel. I take a bite. The tuna is soft and delicious but there isn’t much of it, so I take another piece of bread.
Mirren tells me how she fell in love with acting. “I did Shakespeare at school, and then saw a very bad amateur production of Hamlet which I thought was the most fantastic thing I’d ever seen.” Surprisingly, she has always found performing embarrassing but says acting is “more about disappearing than being the centre of attention. You hide in this imaginative world and when you’re in that world you can do anything.”
After joining the National Youth Theatre, she went to teacher-training college before a successful audition with the Royal Shakespeare Company led to a four-year stint in Stratford-upon-Avon. While in Stratford the environment, as well as the work, made a big impression on her. “It was the first time I’d been exposed to real countryside – the only bit before that was that little strip between Basildon and Dagenham. It was exacerbated by the fact that I was working every day on Shakespeare in the very countryside that he walked on and describes so beautifully in his plays.”
As her stage career took off so did her career in front of the camera, with appearances in O Lucky Man!, Caligula and The Long Good Friday among her early roles. I ask if she had always worked towards the Oscar win. She shakes her head. “I’ve just worked, where and when I can and hoped for the best. Not in terms of winning awards but in terms of hoping that people will want to go and see it or switch it on if it’s on the telly.”
Initially, her parents did not approve of her career. “They thought acting was a stupid career – and they were right. What happened to me was a combination of incredible luck and my single-minded engagement in it.” Her parents weren’t to know she would succeed, she says. “The one thing they wanted above all [for me] was economic independence. Not great wealth, but security. That was very important to my parents because they really had experienced the other side.”
The waiter arrives to ask if we want coffee, and we both order lattes. I wonder if she will miss Jane Tennison, the policewoman she played to such startling effect in seven Prime Suspect TV films. “It was one of the great roles in my life, but I’m not sad it’s over.” Tough and uncompromising but not without flaws, Tennison broke new ground for female characters in television drama when the first Prime Suspect aired in 1991. Mirren becomes animated when we talk about other roles for women. “I find it very annoying to see wonderful actresses of my generation not being able to get work. And then you see male actors of a similar age and a far lesser talent working.”
The solution, she says, lies in getting more women into public life, politics and business. “Think of Condoleezza Rice. Ten years ago, if you’d said one of the most powerful people in the world would be a young, black woman, you’d be laughed off the planet. I’m not critiquing her performance or applauding her politics but what an amazing thing. It means you can write a play about a young, black woman being the most powerful person in the world. And that’s a great role.”
I ask Mirren again about the Oscar win. “I didn’t think the projects I did would lead to me getting that sort of recognition. Then all of a sudden you’re in this thing that you’ve been watching from a distance.”
It sounds terrifying, I say. “You know, it wasn’t because I’ve had a lot of practice.” She has been nominated twice before in the best supporting actress category, first with The Madness of King George and more recently for Gosford Park. “I knew I wasn’t going to win with them. I wasn’t a blip on the radar.”
After the year she has just had that is clearly no longer the case. I ask for the bill and after I have paid we walk out into the sunshine. She needs a lift home so I drive her through the sun-kissed streets of Hollywood to her house. We talk about her next film role, a part in the sequel to Walt Disney’s swashbuckling National Treasure. It was fun, she says, but she is keen to return to London next summer for a season at the National Theatre. We pull up. Then one of the finest actresses of our time gets out of my car, and I say a starstruck goodbye.