Helen Mirren

British actor Helen Mirren (born 1945) has starred in roles ranging from racy to regal over her career of more than 40 years. Mirren is best known for earning Emmy and Academy awards as Queen Elizabeth I and II, respectively. “Indeed, there's something quite haughty about her that suits such parts,” Ryan Gilbey wrote in the British Guardian newspaper.

Early Life

Mirren was born Ilyena Lydian Mironoff on July 26, 1945, in London's Chiswick section. Neither Mirren nor her older sister, Katherine, knew about their Russian blood until after the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. Mirren is a descendant of field marshal Mikhail Kamensky, a hero of the Russo–Turkish war of the late 1700s.

Mirren was the middle child among three. Her father, Basil Mironoff, was a musician and former Russian nobleman who drove a cab in London. Her mother, Kitty Rogers, was a woman from a blue–collar family who claimed gypsy heritage, and whose grandfather was the butcher to Queen Victoria. Mirren's grandfather was Russian aristocrat Pyotr Vasielvich Mironov, who was stranded in London while negotiating a World War I arms deal in 1917, at the start of the Bolshevik revolution. Basil Mironoff strove to integrate the family into English society, anglicizing the surname to Mirren and refusing to teach any of his children Russian.

The young Mirren was educated in Westcliff–on–Sea, at St. Barnard's High School for Girls. Even early on, Shakespearean drama captivated her. At age 13, she played Caliban in a school production of The Tempest. When she left school, she worked briefly as a carnival barker of sorts at a local amusement park called The Kursaal, coaxing people onto rides.

When Mirren told her parents she wanted to pursue acting as a career they frowned on it, encouraging a more secure living. At age 18, she enrolled in a teacher's college in Hampstead, but soon left for the stage. The National Youth Theatre accepted her after an audition, and she made her acting debut in Antony and Cleopatra in 1965. “She was a sensation as Cleopatra and was deemed a revelation due to her sexual presence onstage,” the British Broadcasting Corporation wrote on its Web site.

Within two years, she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), its personnel having noticed her in a Youth Theatre play. She first appeared for RSC in Coriolanus. Later in her early acting years, she made connections with the likes of Patrick Stewart and Ben Kingsley. While in her 20s, Mirren left London in the early 1970s to perform worldwide with stage director Peter Brook's experimental troupe, the International Centre of Theatre Research, and performed in Africa and the United States. It was during this rather wild phase of her life when she got a tattoo. “I was visiting this native American reservation in Minnesota. I got very drunk on brandy and woke up with it the next day,” she told Gilbey. “I haven't had it removed because it's a reminder that I was sometimes a bad girl in the past.”

“Mirren's sexual presence, her passion for her roles and her willingness to show how an intelligent woman had the strength to use her sexuality all became her trademark in the business,” BBC wrote on its Web site. “However, Helen still had to run the gauntlet and ignore the smutty remarks and seedy attitudes of those she was trying to alter.”

Broke into Film

Mirren made her film debut in 1969 as Hermia in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and appeared in the satirical O Lucky Man! in 1973. During the 1970s, Mirren worked in both film and television, in several made–for–TV dramas. In 1979, she played a female lead in a borderline pornographic film Caligula, produced by Penthouse magazine publisher Bob Guccione, Sr. The Guardian's Gilbey called the film “a blight on the [resumes] of all who appeared in it, including Peter O'Toole and John Gielgud.” Andrew Walker wrote for BBC News: “There have been turkeys … most notably the shambolic sub–pornography of Caligula, but Helen Mirren has always redeemed herself with spellbinding performances at just the right time.” In her early years, Gilbey added: “She seemed to be playing up to her off–screen image as a free spirit happy to hang out with the hippies, while her more serious work … was restricted to the stage.”

Mirren took on more serious roles in the 1980s. She co–starred with Bob Hoskins, playing the tough–as–nails moll to a gangland leader in The Long Good Friday and made a name for herself in Hollywood with her appearance beside Harrison Ford and River Phoenix in The Mosquito Coast. She was also a moll, working with Michael Gambon, in The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. In addition, Mirren played Morgana opposite Nicol Williamson's Merlin in Excalibur. There, director John Boorman effectively drew on the dislike Mirren and Williamson developed a few years back while working together on Macbeth.

While filming Excalibur, Mirren met another rising actor, Liam Neeson, and they had a brief relationship. In 1984, she met Taylor Hackford, who directed An Officer and a Gentleman. She moved in with him in 1986 and they married on New Year's Eve, 1999, at Ardesier Parish Church in Scotland. Hackford first met her when she appeared in his 1985 movie, White Knights; at the time, he said she emanated “cold disdain,” as reported in the Guardian.

From 1990 to 2006, she played detective inspector Jane Tennison in the Prime Suspect series. Tennison alternated between confused and ruthless, and frequently made waves with male police officers. The ratings success of Prime Suspect in the 1990s was an effective transition for a Mirren approaching her 50s. It ran from 1990 to 2006— ending with her retirement from the force—and earned her Emmy, Golden Globe, and British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) nominations. “It allowed me finally to step forward to the next generation, to catch up with who I really was,” she told Gilbey. “It was a huge relief not to have to play even one year younger.”

Juggled On–Screen Personas

Though Mirren has best shone in her more sophisticated roles, she downplays that with a down–to–earth persona. “Sometimes, she will accomplish this by making very un–Hollywood, off–the–cuff statements such as: 'I've always been a bit of a wild thing and have the scars to prove it,” Gilbey wrote. She has freely discussed her relationships with Neeson and Williamson, both stormy at times.

She is also active politically, battling the sex–slave trade in Asia, working for Oxfam International against the buildup of arms, and pleading to the British government on behalf of Ugandan children ensnared in civil war. About aging, she told the Guardian: “There's a difficult period between 44 and 58 when you're no longer a mature, good–looking woman and not yet an old bird, but after that it's fine.”

Mirren continued to star in productions in the new millennium. She appeared on Broadway in Dance of Death in 2001 and played the title role in a remake of the Tennessee Williams classic, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, in 2003. She also starred in Pride (2004), a BBC One production, which featured computer animation.

Won Acclaim as Queen

Mirren's roles have also included Lady Macbeth, and as a contrast, a cruel teacher in Teaching Mrs. Tingle (1999). She also played the mother of a hunger–striking Irish Republican Army (IRA) prisoner Some Mother's Son (1996). She “can switch with aplomb between classical drama, hard–boiled thrillers and breezy comedy,” Gilbey wrote. In the television miniseries Elizabeth I, produced by Tom Hooper and released in 2005, she played Britain's aging queen juggling her public and private personas. Mirren, who had turned 60 around the time, won three Golden Globe awards and an Emmy, among her many accolades. Pauline Kael, as quoted by Gilbey, wrote in the New Yorker: “Probably no other actress can let you know that she's playing a distinguished and important woman.”

She finally won an Academy Award in 2007, for best leading actress in The Queen. In that film, she portrayed Queen Elizabeth II as the royal family coped with aftermath of the death of Princess Diana in an automobile accident in Paris, France. Mirren had already won BAFTA, Golden Globe, and Screen Actors Guild awards for her performance. Her Oscar win surprised no one. Bookmaking company William Hill began paying out bets one week before the ceremony, and Oscar host Ellen DeGeneres quipped during the event, according to BBC News: “It's exciting because you don't know who's going to win—unless you're British, and then you know you've a pretty good shot.”

Mirren, who was named a Dame of the British Empire in 2003, said on BBC News: “I had to recognize the person that I was playing and everything that she means to us and to me and to the history of our country and all the rest of it.” She received a congratulatory phone call from the queen herself and an invitation for her, director Stephen Frears, and screenwriter Peter Morgan to join her for lunch at Buckingham Palace. “I think it's wonderful that I live in a country that allows us to make a film like this,” she said, also on BBC News.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair only added to the praise. “It takes a very special kind of actress to take on a role of this kind and to do so to universal acclaim. Helen Mirren is a very special kind of actress and her Oscar is well deserved,” Blair said in a statement published on BBC News. Michael Sheen played Blair's character in the movie.

Mirren also went on to give struggling British television network Independent Television, commonly known as ITV, an inadvertent shot in the arm. ITV partially underwrote Elizabeth II. The network also carried a two–part, four–hour sequel to Prime Suspect, with Mirren in her old role as Jane Tennison. ITV carried Elizabeth II in the fall of 2007. Prime Suspect: The Final Act also won an Emmy.

Breath of Fresh Air in Hollywood

Cashing in on her fame, later in 2007 Mirren published her autobiography, In the Frame, published by Orion/ McArthur. “It just flew off the page and it's not been changed,” she told the Web site of Canadian cable television network CTV. She was so prolific she threw her publishers into a tizzy. “They wanted 20,000 words but before I knew it I'd written 56,000 and they were screaming stop. We've got too many words. It'll be too big a book. Stop writing,” she told the CTV.ca Web site. Constance Droganes of CTV.ca praised the down–to–earth tone in Mirren's book, which includes Russian family roots, personal anecdotes, dumpy apartments, and life–learning experiences. “Mirren's story is rich, entertaining, and one that makes ‘life apprenticeship,’ not 15 minutes of fame, the real prize at the end of this page–turner,” Droganes wrote.

Mirren will not slow down. In National Treasure, Book of Secrets, released in 2007, she starred with Nicholas Cage in a film about missing information related to the 1865 assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. She also appears in Inkheart, scheduled for release in March of 2008 and set in medieval times. Future movie projects include State of Play, an adaptation of the British miniseries, and Love Ranch, directed by her husband, and involving Nevada's first legalized brothel.

Mirren and Hackford live in Los Angeles; she is the stepmother of Hackford's two sons, Rio and Alex. Being fluent in French, Mirren also owns houses in London and southern France. In recent years the couple sold their estate in New Orleans, Louisiana. “In a scandal–happy showbiz fueled by botox–junkie actresses, rehab–hotties, and jail– bound badsters, Mirren, 62, has done the impossible by today's Hollywood standards: not just last, but blast her career into a level of super stardom that's rarely ever seen,” Droganes wrote.

Online

“Dame Helen Crowned Best Actress,” BBC News, February 26, 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/6396179.stm (December 23, 2007).

“Dame Helen Mirren—Actress,” BBC, May 1, 2007, http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A21388494 (December 6, 2007).

“Helen Mirren,” Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000545/ (December 6, 2007).

“Helen Mirren Dishes about Life ‘In the Frame,’ ” CTV, December 3, 2007, http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20071130/ENT_Mirren_071130/20071202?hub=Entertainment (December 6, 2007).

“Helen Mirren: In Her Prime,” BBC News, June 13, 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/2988112.stm (December 6, 2007).

“Helen Mirren: The Queen of All She Portrays,” Guardian, August 13, 2006, http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,1844293,00.html (December 6, 2007).