Helen Mirren breaking records, taboos on way to Oscar coronation
By Alex Ben Block

Unprecedented accolades for Mirren on road to Oscars

HOLLYWOOD, CA (Hollywood Today) 02/16/07 — If Dame Helen Mirren, the odds-on favorite to win best actress at this year’s Academy Awards, were really Queen of England, the 61-year-old Brit would be a lot more like Princess Di than the uptight leader of the Windsor clan she portrayed.
“I’d quite like to have a monarchy the way the Swedish people do, a royal family who go to the supermarket and you see them in the supermarket. I think that’s how everyone should behave,” Mirren said recently while promoting “The Queen”.”I’d like to see movie stars in supermarkets as well.”
She defines class but Mirren has been earthy and outspoken throughout her career. Once billed as Britain’s sex siren, the classically trained thespian has shown a willingness to break star-mentality taboos against ageism, repeatedly appear nude (even at age 58 in “Calendar Girls”), speak out about causes, use salty language and push the limits of her art. The result has been a world class body of work in movies, TV and on stage.
Now she appears to be a shoo-in to win her first Oscar after two previous nominations. And she will win, if history means anything. After four decades as a star, Mirren is having a historic year. No one has ever swept the awards season acting honors like Mirren and not won the Oscar.
Her unprecedented win streak over the past year for “Elizabeth I” and “The Queen” includes an Emmy, the Venice Film Festival, numerous critical plaudits from New York to L.A, and dual awards from the Golden Globes. She is only the third actress ever honored twice at the Screen Actor’s Guild. She won BAFTA Awards and top acting honors from the Broadcast Critics, among many others.

Mirren says forget Oscars,
give her a dog handling award

Mirren’s Oscar triumph will also break the age jinx. She would become one of the few female actors over age 50 and the first since Jessica Tandy in 1990’s “Driving Miss Daisy” to win. The only other woman over 50 to win any acting Oscar in the past 15 years was Judy Dench, who is nominated again this year, but already all but conceded to Mirren when she announced she would not attend the awards ceremony later this month.
For her award winning role, Mirren studied the real Queen before and during the making of the movie. She had a TV monitor in her trailer on the set and played tapes of the Queen all during production. She would randomly pick points to watch on the tape and sections to read in books about Elizabeth II.
Mirren says she studied the Queen as a person: “You take that iconic thing away from her,” Mirren explains. “You try and separate her from that and you try and look in the person within that. I studied her psychologically and thoughtfully with sensitivity. I tried to imitate the tilt of her head but I never looked in the mirror and compared it to her photo.”
She may play a queen but don’t expect this Dame to change when she wins an Academy Award, which she once called, “the creme-de-la-creme of bullshit.”
“Actors are rogues and vagabonds,” Mirren has said, “or they ought to be. I can’t stand it when they behave like solicitors…I’m a would-be rebel.”
Mirren turned down the honor of being made a DBE (Dame of the British Empire) in 1996 because she felt it made her seem too much like part of the establishment. She finally allowed herself to be taped at the Queen’s Birthday Honors in June 2003, where her honor was presented by Prince Charles. The Queen was not present. “In the end,” Mirren was later quoted, “my baser feelings got the better of me. I succumbed to pride.”
Mirren only met Elizabeth II once, a little more than five years ago. She was presented to the Queen with fellow actor Chloe Sevigny. “It lasted 20 seconds,” Mirren recalls. “But she was absolutely charming. It was lovely. It was quite in a relaxed circumstance at the time and lots of other people around. She’s very good at being charming to everyone. I think when you first meet the Queen, you have to bow (your head) at least. The Queen herself says, ‘I don’t measure the depth of curtsey.’ I found myself doing it (curtsey) whether you want to or not out of respect.”

Mirren still not afraid to do nude scenes

Recently named one of Mr. Blackwell’s ten best dressed women, Mirren says if she really were Queen, she would dress better than Elizabeth II. “When you look at film of her she just puts the most awful (clothes) things together,” says Mirren. “She’ll put a yellow shirt with a pink thing and royal blue cardigan on top and then something else on top of that. She doesn’t think about what she wears, that’s my feeling.”
It was typical of Mirren to speak her mind. Winning awards hasn’t changed that. She made it clear who she was back stage at the Golden Globes in Beverly Hills in January. She wasn’t kidding when she said: “I’m an Essex girl,” adding slyly, “You know how you know if an Essex girl has an orgasm? She drops her fries.”
She was born July 26, 1945 in the Essex section of London’s East End as Ilyena Lydia Mironoff. Her father, as the story goes, was an aristocratic Russian caught in England by the Russian Revolution. He was a musician who played violin for the London Philharmonic Orchestra and at times was a taxi driver and automobile driving instructor. He was the one who anglicized the family name.
Mirren’s mother was Kitty Rogers, a working class English girl from Pimlico whose family were butchers. Their claim to fame was that Kitty’s grandfather had been Queen Victoria’s butcher.
Mirren has said she knew she wanted to be an actress by the time she was six years old. By age 20 she was playing Cleopatra for the National Youth Theater, where she was discovered by the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was there her unusual sexuality became apparent. It was the 1960s, a time of sexual revolution in society, and Mirren brought a new level of sexuality to her Lady Macbeth. She became known as the “sex queen of the RSC.”
In 1969, Mirren moved her smoldering sexuality to the screen for director Michael Powell’s “Age Of Consent,” playing a young girl who inspired a jaded artist. The 40-year age gap between the on-screen lovers only added to Mirren’s sexy reputation.
In 1972, Mirren toured Africa and America with the International Centre of Theatre Research. They would perform in return for stories from various tribes. In the U.S., they visited an Indian reservation in Minnesota where Mirren, reportedly drunk on brandy, had an Indian symbol for equality tattooed between her left thumb and forefinger. She later said she did not remove it because “it’s a reminder that I was sometimes a bad girl.”
Her most notorious movie is the version of Caligula produced in 1979 by the publisher of Penthouse magazine. The movie was pornographic and a critical disaster, despite a cast that besides Mirren included John Gielgud, Peter O’Toole and Malcolm McDowell.
Mirren met director Taylor Hackford in 1986 and married him on New Year’s Eve of 1997 at Ardersier Parish Church, in Scotland. It was her first marriage and his third. That made Mirren, who has never had children, step mother to Hackford’s sons Alex and Rio. The couple have homes in Los Angeles, London, New Orleans and the south of France.

Despite dozens of brilliant film performances, Mirren may be best known around the globe as Detective Superintendent Jane Tennison in Lynda La Plante’s British produced TV series Prime Suspect. It ran from 1990 to 2006, in the U.S. on PBS, winning Mirren an Emmy, a Golden Globe nomination, several BAFTAs and other awards.
Having been a movie star and played a royal monarch, Mirren says they are quite different. “Monarchy is very different from celebrity. It doesn’t fulfill the same functions as celebrity.”
So while Mirren would like to see the British royals be more accessible and down to earth, she doesn’t want to do away with them. “It’s more to do with truly being an icon of your country which is really different from being a celebrity,” says Mirren. “I think there is a value in having an iconic sort of representative of our country and your history. For Americans it’s the statue of liberty. The Queen is like (the British) Statue of Liberty.”
What does Mirren think would be worthy of an honor? “Our AD (assistant director on “The Queen”) said I should win an award for dog handling,” says Mirren. “Forget the Oscar. I’d be very proud of a dog handling award. I was very good with the dogs. I worked with them. They were not trained dogs…Just a pack of Corgis that were rented…I love those Corgis. They’re funny little dogs. I can understand why the Queen has them.”
And we can understand why Oscar won’t go to the dogs. It will go to Mirren.