Dame Helen Mirren, DBE, (born on July
26 1945) is an English stage, television and film
actress. She has won an Academy Award, four
SAG Awards and assorted BAFTAs, Golden Globes and
Emmy Awards during her career.
Personal life
Mirren was born Ilyena Vasilievna Mironov[1] in a corridor of the maternity wing of Queen
Charlotte's Hospital, Chiswick in West London; according to her 2007 memoirs "the
fastest birth on record at that time. I wonder if anyone has broken it yet?" But the first house she remembers living in was in
Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, when she was two or three years old, after the birth of her
younger brother, named Peter Basil after his grandfather and great-great-grandfather.
Her great-great-great-great-grandfather was the Russian field-marshal Mikhail Kamensky, one of the heroes of the
Napoleonic wars.
Two years after the birth of her older sister Katherine ("known now as Kate") she was the second of three children of a father
of Russian origin, Vasiliy Petrovich Mironov (1913-1980); and an English mother, Kathleen Rogers (1909-1980). Mirren's paternal grandfather, Pyotr Vassili Mironov, a
Russian nobleman, tsarist colonel and diplomat, was negotiating an arms deal in Britain
and was stranded there, along with his family, during the Russian Revolution.
Her father called himself Basil and changed the family name to Mirren in the 1950s. He played the viola with the London Philharmonic before World War II and, after it, drove a cab and was a driving-test examiner, before becoming a civil servant
with the Ministry of Transport.
Mirren's mother was from West Ham, London and was the
thirteenth of fourteen children born to a butcher whose father had been the butcher to Queen Victoria. Mirren considers her upbringing to have been "very anti-monarchist"
[2], a somewhat ironic statement when considering her
choice of acting roles.
Mirren attended a Catholic girls' school, St. Bernard's High School, in Southend-on-Sea, and subsequently a teaching college, the New College of Speech and Drama in
London "housed within Anna Pavlova's old home, Ivy House" on the Hampstead Road.
At age 18 she auditioned for the National Youth Theatre and was accepted. By
age 20 she was starring as Cleopatra in the NYT production of Antony and
Cleopatra at the Old Vic, which led to her signing with the agent Al Parker.
Mirren married American director Taylor
Hackford (her partner since 1986), in the Scottish Highlands on
31 December 1997, his 53rd birthday. It was her first
marriage, and his third (he has two children from his previous marriage). Mirren has no children and says she has "no maternal
instinct whatsoever."[3]
On 5 December 2003, she was invested as a Dame Commander of the British Empire. When she received the honour, Mirren commented that
Prince Charles was "very graceful" but forgot to give her half of the award,
where another person had to remind him to give Mirren the star. She also stated that she felt wary about accepting the award and
had to be persuaded by fellow comrades to accept the DBE. In 1996 she had previously declined a CBE.[4]
Mirren's autobiography was published in the UK by Weidenfeld and Nicholson in September 2007, under the title In the Frame:
My Life in Words and Pictures.
Theatre
Following appearances on stage during her school years at St Bernard's High School for Girls in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, Mirren's first starring role was in 1965 as
Cleopatra for the National Youth Theatre.
This led to her joining the Royal Shakespeare Company, playing Castiza in
Trevor Nunn's 1966 staging of The Revenger's Tragedy, Cressida in
Troilus and Cressida in 1968 and the title role in Miss Julie at The Other Place in 1971. In 1972-73
Mirren worked with Peter Brook's International Centre for Theatre Research, and joined the
group's tour in North Africa and the US which created The Conference of the
Birds. Returning to the RSC she played Lady Macbeth at Stratford in
1974 and at the Aldwych Theatre in 1975.
As reported by Sally Beaumann in her 1982 history of the RSC, Mirren while appearing in Nunn's
Macbeth and in a highly publicised letter to The Guardian newspaper, attacked
both the National Theatre and the RSC for their lavish production expenditure,
declaring it "unnecessary and destructive to the art of the Theatre"; adding, "The realms of truth, emotion and imagination
reached for in acting a great play have become more and more remote, often totally unreachable across an abyss of costume and
technicalities..." But Mirren was only stating publicly what many RSC actors had been saying in private for some years. At the
Royal Court in September 1975 she notably played rock star Maggie in Teeth 'n' Smiles, a musical play by David Hare, which was
revived at Wyndham's Theatre in May 1976 winning her the Plays & Players Best Actress award, voted by the London critics.
From November 1975 Mirren played in West End repertory with the Lyric Theatre Company as Nina
in The Seagull and Ella in Ben Travers' new
farce The Bed Before Yesterday ("Mirren is stirringly voluptuous as the Harlowesque
good-time girl": Michael Billington, The Guardian, 10 December 1975). At the RSC in Stratford in 1977, and at the Aldwych the
following year, she played a steely Queen Margaret in Terry Hands' production of the three
parts of Henry VI, while 1979 saw her 'bursting with grace' with an acclaimed
performance as Isabella in Peter Gill's otherwise unexceptional production of
Measure for Measure at Riverside
Studios. In 1981 she returned to the Royal Court for the London premiere of Brian
Friel's Faith Healer. In the same year she also received acclaim for her
performance in the title role of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, a Royal Exchange
Theatre production at the Round House in London. Reviewing her portrayal for the
Sunday Telegraph, Francis King wrote: "Miss
Mirrren never leaves it in doubt that even in her absences, this ardent, beautiful woman is the most important character of the
story."
Her performance as Moll Cutpurse in The Roaring
Girl at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in January 1983, and at the
Barbican Theatre April 1983), "swaggered through the action with radiant singularity of
purpose, filling in areas of light and shade that even Thomas Middleton and
Thomas Dekker omitted." - Michael Coveney,
Financial Times, April 1983. After a relatively barren sojourn in the Hollywood Hills,
she returned to England at the beginning of 1989 to co-star with Bob Peck at the
Young Vic in the London premiere of the Arthur Miller
double-bill, Two Way Mirror, performances which prompted Miller to remark: "What is so
good about English actors is that they are not afraid of the open expression of large emotions" (interview by Sheridan Morley: The Times 11 January 1989). In Elegy for a Lady she played the svelte proprietress of a classy boutique, while as the blonde hooker in
Some Kind of Love Story she was "clad in a Freudian slip and shifting easily from
waif-like vulnerability to sexual aggression, giving the role a breathy Monroesque quality" (Michael Billington, The
Guardian).
A stage career breakthrough came in 1994, in an Yvonne Arnaud Theatre
production bound for the West End, when Bill Bryden cast her as Natalya Petrovna in
Ivan Turgenev's A Month in the
Country. Her co-stars were John Hurt as her aimless lover Rakitin and
Ralph Fiennes in only his second professional stage appearance as the cocksure young tutor
Belyaev. "Instead of a bored Natalya fretting the summmer away in dull frocks, Mirren, dazzlingly gowned, is a woman almost
wilfully allowing her heart's desire for her son's young tutor to rule her head and wreak domestic havoc....Creamy shoulders
bared, she feels free to launch into a gloriously enchanted, dreamily comic self-confession of love." (John Thaxter, Richmond & Twickenham Times, 4 March 1994).
Mirren was twice nominated for Broadway's Tony Award as Best Actress (Play): in 1995 for
A Month in the Country, now directed by Scott Ellis ("Miss Mirren's performance is bigger and more animated than the one she gave last year in an
entirely different London production", Vincent Canby in the NY Times, April 26, 1995). Then again in 2002 for August Strindberg's Dance of Death,
co-starring with Ian McKellen, their fraught rehearsal period coinciding with New York's
'9/11' (2001, as recorded in her In the Frame autobiography, September 2007).
She had an unhappy experience at the National Theatre in 1998 when she played
Cleopatra to Alan Rickman's Antony. But in 2000 Nicholas
Hytner, who had worked with Mirren on the film version of The Madness of
King George, cast her as Lady Torrance in his revival of Tennessee
Williams' Orpheus Descending at the Donmar Warehouse in London. Michael Billington, reviewing for The
Guardian, described her performance as "an exemplary study of an immigrant woman who has acquired a patina of
resilient toughness but who slowly acknowledges her sensuality."
At the National Theatre in November 2003 she again won praise playing Christine Mannon ("defiantly cool, camp and skittish",
Evening Standard; "glows with mature sexual allure", Daily Telegraph) in a revival of Eugene O'Neill's
Mourning Becomes Electra directed by Howard Davies.
“This production was one of the best experiences of my professional life, The play was four and a half hours long, and I have
never known that kind of response from an audience...It was the serendipity of a beautifully cast play, with great design and
direction, It will be hard to be in anything better.” (In the Frame, September 2007).
Film
Mirren has made numerous appearances in an array of films. Some of her earlier film appearances include Excalibur, 2010: The Year We Make
Contact where she speaks Russian, The Long Good Friday,
White Nights and The Mosquito
Coast. After those appearances she received roles in Belfast-born director Terry
George's film Some Mother's Son, which was about the 1981 Hunger Strikes in Northern Ireland, opposite
Irish actress Fionnuala Flanagan,
Painted Lady, The Prince of
Egypt and The Madness of King George. One of Mirren's other
film roles was in Peter Greenaway's The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, as the eponymous thief's
wife, opposite Michael Gambon.
Mirren continued her successful film career when she starred more recently in Gosford
Park with Maggie Smith and Calendar
Girls where she starred with Julie Walters. Other more recent appearances
include The Clearing, Pride,
Raising Helen, and Shadowboxer. Mirren
also provided the voice for the supercomputer "Deep
Thought" in the film adaptation of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. During her career, she has
portrayed three British queens in different films and television series. These include Elizabeth I in the television series Elizabeth
I (2005), Elizabeth II in the film The Queen (2006), and Queen Charlotte,
the wife of George III, in The Madness of King George (1994). Her role in The Queen gained her numerous
awards including a BAFTA, a Golden Globe, and an Oscar. During her acceptance speech at
the Academy Award ceremony, Mirren praised and thanked Elizabeth II and stated that she had maintained her dignity and weathered
many storms during her reign as Queen.[5]
Mirren has frequently appeared nude on film as far back as her first film Age of
Consent, and was over 50 when she appeared nude in the film Calendar Girls and on the cover of the
Radio Times October 5-11 issue in 1996.
Television
Mirren is most often recognized for her role as detective Jane Tennison in the well-known
Prime Suspect, a television drama that ran for seven
series. The role won her three consecutive BAFTA awards for Best Actress between 1992 to 1994. Other acclaimed television
performances include Cousin Bette (1971), As You Like It (1979), Losing Chase (1996), The Passion of Ayn Rand (1999) where her performance won her both the Emmy and the Golden Globe, Door to Door (2002), and The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
(2003). In 1976 Mirren appeared opposite Laurence Olivier, Alan Bates and Malcolm McDowell in the episode The Collection of the Granada television series Laurence Olivier Presents. She also played Elizabeth I in 2005, in the television series Elizabeth I, for Channel 4 and HBO, where she received an Emmy for her performance. Mirren won another Emmy on
September 16, 2007 for her role in Prime Suspect: The Final Act on PBS in the same
category as in 2006.
Awards and recognition
Film awards
In 1984, Mirren won Best Actress for her role in the film Cal at the
Cannes Film Festival and the 1985 Evening
Standard British Film Awards. In 1994 and 2001, she was nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her
roles in The Madness of King George and Gosford Park, respectively. In 1995, she had also been awarded for Best
Actress once again in Cannes for playing Queen Charlotte in The Madness of King George. In 2002, she received the SAG
Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture for Gosford Park. Mirren is the first female actress to be nominated
for three acting performances at the Golden Globe Awards in the same year. She won
the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Leading Role in the movie drama category for Stephen
Frears' The Queen in 2006 (along with two nominations in the Actress in a
Mini-series or TV Movie category for Elizabeth I, and Prime Suspect: Final Act). She won both Golden Globes for
The Queen and Elizabeth I and also won two SAG awards the same year for the same roles. Mirren is the third actor
to win two Golden Globes in the same year, and the first ever to win for both leading roles in TV and film in the same year. She
is one of only three actresses ( the first was Liza Minnelli in 1973 and also decades later Helen
Hunt) to win a Golden Globe, an Oscar and an Emmy for performances given in the same year.
Along with the Golden Globe, Mirren's acclaimed performance in The Queen won her the 2007 Academy Award for Best Actress.[6] She also received Best Actress awards from the Venice Film
Festival, Broadcast Film Critics, National Board of Review, Satellite Awards, Screen Actors Guild and a BAFTA, as well as
critics awards from all over the world. Entertainment Weekly recently ranked her Number 2 for Entertainer of the Year for 2006
and also won the award for best actress in film at the new Greatest Britons Awards for
her role in The Queen. In 2007 Mirren became an Honorary Patron of the University Philosophical Society at Trinity College Dublin.
Television awards
Mirren won a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Leading Role in a Mini-series or TV Movie in 1997 for her role in Losing
Chase. She received two nominations in the Actress in a Mini-series or TV Movie category for Elizabeth I, and Prime Suspect: The Final Act, where she only won the Golden Globe
for her title role performance in Elizabeth I. In that same year she won an SAG award for that same role. Mirren also won
an Emmy for her role in Elizabeth I in category Lead Actress in a Mini-Series or a Movie in 2006. She had previously won
an Emmy twice before, in that same category, in 1996 for her role in Prime Suspect: Scent of Darkness and in 1999 for
The Passion of Ayn Rand.[7]
At the end of a triumphant year of awards for her acclaimed movie performance as Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen, Dame
Helen also collected a 2007 Emmy Television award as Best Actress in a Mini-Series for her performance as Detective
Superintendent Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect: The Final Act. She now has four Emmy awards. This seventh and apparently
concluding instalment of the Prime Suspect saga portrayed Tennison as an alcoholic destined for retirement, and was
screened in the US on the public service network PBS.
Critics' Circle Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts
Each year since 1988 The Critics' Circle has presented an award for Distinguished
Service to the Arts, voted for by all members of the Circle, embracing Dance, Drama, Film, Music, Visual Arts and Architecture.
At a celebratory luncheon on 10th April 2007 in the National Theatre's Terrace Restaurant, the award for 2006 was presented to
Dame Helen Mirren.[8] As David
Gritten, chairman of the Film section made clear, the decision to make the award was voted on in November 2006, well in
advance of the awards hubbub that surrounded her performance in The Queen.
Accepting the award, an engraved crystal rose bowl, Mirren described it as the most useful she has ever received, while
reflecting poignantly that this now "might be the last award I will win in my life. It has been a most incredible year. You do
the work and then....." Previous recipients include Sir Peter Hall (1988),
Dame Judi Dench (1997) and Ian McKellen (2003).
Filmography
Mirren aged 24 in
Age of Consent (1969)
