Dame Helen Mirren: I’m an Essex girl

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<span style="font-size:19.5pt;"><font face="Verdana">Dame Helen Mirren: I’m an Essex girl</font></span>

<span style="font-size:10.5pt;"><b><font face="Verdana">Nominated for an Academy Award, the actress is typically frank about marriage, fame, plastic surgery and posh accents</font></b></span>

<span style="font-size:7.5pt;"><b><font face="Tahoma">Kevın Maher</font></b></span>

<span style="font-size:9pt;"><font face="Verdana">It’s that time of year again. Dame Helen Mirren, the 64-year-old national treasure and screen royalty, is going to the Oscars. The four-time Academy Award nominee and one-time winner (for The Queen) has been nominated yet again in the Best Actress category for playing Sofya, the volcanic wife of Leo Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer), in the sweetly moving melodrama The Last Station. The nomination is a confirmation of Mirren’s prowess as an actress, while the ceremony is a chance to celebrate her considerable achievements all over again. So she’s excited, right? “Oh, it’s such a palaver!” she says, with a deflated sigh. “It’s like a day’s work. You have to decide what you’re going to wear. You put on your costume. You do your performance. It’s exhausting. And if you win, everyone wants a piece of you.” She pauses for a nanosecond, barely taking a breath, and casually does a whopping volte-face. “Of course, it’s the mothership of all ceremonies. And it’s a fantastic, wonderful, carnival that you just can’t resist. You jump aboard the roundabout, get whizzed round until you’re vaguely nauseous and stagger off happily at the end, back to reality.”

Mirren, you quickly learn, is a master of the contrapuntal statement. In black skirt and white blouse (with a high and ornate lacy collar — very 19th century) and lightly bobbed silver hair, she slowly sips coffee in the garish basement suite of a boutique London hotel and contemplates all issues from both sides at once. Does she work out? “Yes and no.” How did she rate her early performances? “I thought I was brilliant and I thought I was crap.” How much did her own heritage (her father was Russian) matter when playing Sofya Tolstoy? “Not at all. But having said that . . .”

From anyone else this might seem like indecision or contrarian deliberating, but from Mirren it arrives, somehow, as serene objectivity. The star of staples from Excalibur to Prime Suspect to Gosford Park to Calendar Girls is not, it must be noted, the sex siren of media legend, pulsing killer pheromones into the ether. Instead she is something much quieter and even slightly regal, like your favourite posh auntie (“My poshed-over voice was learnt and assimilated,” she will explain. “I was an Essex girl”).

Of the Oscars she will concede that her best memories are celebrating her Queen win with her family, eating that infamous burger at the Vanity Fair party in 2007 (a photo of which made front pages around the world), and flying into Heathrow two days after the ceremony to be greeted by an ovation from the baggage handlers and customs officials. “I didn’t cry when I got my Oscar, but I cried then,” she says. “I had my Oscar in my bag, so I got it out. I was shameless, but they loved it.”

She has mixed feelings, naturally, about how her role in The Last Station is focusing all attention on her Russian roots. Yes, she’s played Russians before, most notably in the movies 2010 and White Knights (where she met her future husband, the American director Taylor Hackford). And yes, physiologically speaking, her base setting is a solemn-eyed Russian “look” (on early trips to Moscow she would often be mistaken for a local, and asked directions). But there were other, more prominent, things about The Last Station that appealed to her. The character of Sofya, for one, is a powerhouse role. Alone and outnumbered by her husband’s obsessive and often jealous acolytes, including Paul Giamatti’s sinister Chertkov and James McAvoy’s idealistic Bulgakov, the movie charts Sofya’s battle to reclaim her very real and tempestuous relationship with Tolstoy from the mythmakers that surround him.

The film gestated fitfully for more than 20 years, with Mirren’s role once in the hands of Meryl Streep, then Glenn Close. It was one of the first parts she was offered after her Oscar win, although she is unsure how much the award affected her casting. “You can’t ask people: ‘Did you cast me in this because I won an Oscar?’ They’d always deny it: ‘No! No! We would’ve had you anyway!’ Liars!”

Hers is nonetheless the biggest performance in the movie — she rages, she wails, she roars — and she admits that it was a challenge to keep it as “unoperatic and as realistic as possible”. It is a wildly compelling performance that describes Sofya in tragicomic turns, one moment petty and self-indulgent, the next softly maternal and affectionate. It’s a bold leap away from traditional Mirren territory and will certainly be a surprise to those familiar only with the froideur of Prime Suspect’s Jane Tennison or the tight-lipped reticence of her Queen Elizabeth II.

The film itself, she says, is a profound statement about the inner workings of a marriage. “The most telling line that Sofya has is when she says: ‘Why should it be easy? You are the work of my life and I am the work of yours. That’s what love is.’ I think that’s a brilliant description. Because it is work. And you go through all different mountains and valleys in a marriage.”

She says that her own marriage is often one of mutual professional support. “This is no bullshit: the reason I’m still with Taylor after all these years [they married in 1997, but have lived together since 1986] is because he supports me in my work, he’s proud of my successes and he’s sympathetic if things aren’t successful. If they aren’t, he’ll say, ‘F*** ’em darling! You were great.’ And I do likewise.”

She adds, in classic contrapuntal style, that being married to Hackford is kind of irrelevant, because it’s the relationship that matters. “I was with my husband for years before we got married. It’s nice to be married. I love it. And that took me by surprise. But there’s really no essential difference to not being married.”

There are some subjects, however, that are not seemingly open to ambiguity. Most notably, there is Mirren’s sex bomb status, about which she has increasingly indignant feelings. As a fledgeling theatre actress, for instance, in the early Seventies, she was cast by drama critics as “the sex queen of the RSC” and seen as “stirringly voluptuous” and “sluttishly erotic”. At the time she faked a smile and played along, but today she is seething. “In my mind I was a serious actress,” she begins, visibly agitated. “But the men in that era got away with such sexist crap. It was constant. They were pushing me into being Barbara Windsor, that sort of Carry On type. And it wasn’t because of my beauty. I was never beautiful. It was because of these!”

She holds both hands out in front of her chest, as if she’s weighing up two enormous, ahem, watermelons. “I remember doing a photo-shoot for the play Teeth and Smiles (1975). And this arsehole photographer was saying: ‘Cross your legs and lean down, dear!’ Because he wanted these.” Again she points to the breasts.

There is a BBC Parkinson interview with Mirren from this time that is almost impossible to watch for its sheer chauvinistic creepiness. In it, Michael Parkinson leers at Mirren’s chest, laddishly refers to her “equipment” and jokes that: “Your bosoms might detract from the performance.”

“Your jaw is on the floor watching it,” she says, recalling the interview (which can be found on YouTube; type in “The Sexist Parkinson Interview”). “He has always denied that it was sexist, but it was.”

But Mirren too added considerable erotic fuel to the flames with a series of art-sex photos taken in the late Seventies by her then boyfriend, the photographer James Wedge (cue corsets, suspender belts, lots of milk and bottoms). “But that was on my terms,” she says. “I don’t mind being sexy, but on my terms. To this day, I love sexuality. I love the art of sexuality. I love Lady Gaga and the performance of sexuality. The mysterious, the artistic and the slightly perverse. I’m interested in all that.”

Mirren says that from a young age she knew that she would never be normal. “Some people like the familiar, and love being rooted,” she says with almost a perceptible shiver. “I didn’t want roots. I wanted the unfamiliar, the strange and the other. And I really, really, really didn’t want to grow up, get married and settle down.”

She says that instead, as one of three children born to Basil Mirren (formerly Vasiliy Mironov), an East End cab driver, and his English wife Kathleen, she found her inspiration, aged 13, at an amateur production of Hamlet in Southend. “I was blown away by all this over-the-top drama,” she says. “We grew up without TV and never went to the cinema, so after Hamlet all I wanted to do was get back into that world where all those fabulous things were possible.”

She graduated to the RSC via the National Youth Theatre and soon became an established theatre star, boob jokes notwithstanding. She travelled to Paris and Africa with the RSC’s Peter Brook, putting on improvised plays in the agit-prop spirit of the Sixties. She dated the actors Nicol Williamson and Liam Neeson (“A wonderful relationship”) and met Hackford in 1984. Her ascendency to screen stardom was slower, and though she perceived herself mostly as a theatre actress, she continued to punctuate the decades with knockout performances in movies such as The Cook The Thief His Wife & Her Lover, The Comfort of Strangers and Some Mother’s Sons. It wasn’t, however, until her annus mirabilis of 2006 (or “my amazing 18 months”) that she became, courtesy of The Queen, a genuine movie heavyweight.

She is still plagued by self-doubt, she says, and not even Oscar glory can confirm her confidence in her own abilities. “You never have that, unfortunately,” she says with a shrug. She is facing the ageing process gracefully, and consistently claims that she was “flattered” by her infamous red bikini paparazzi shots (taken in July 2008, while on holiday in Italy). She says outright that she would definitely consider cosmetic surgery. But tastefully done, yes? “No,” she says, deadpan but snickering. “It’s the full-on for me! Suck it all up, tie it up, and then cut if all off!”

Is that because her image-obsessed profession dictates it? “No,” she gasps, horrified, before chuckling. “I’d think about it even more if I was in a different profession. If I wasn’t on camera I would have had it done years ago.”

She has homes in Los Angeles and London. She is unimpressed by British politics and sees cynicism and liars everywhere. The prospect of a David Cameron Government gives her the longest pause in our entire conversation — at least five seconds. Finally she answers: “I’m not by nature a supporter of the Conservatives, but then the Conservatives are not what the Conservatives used to be.”

Then, true to form, she allows herself a tiny breath before adding mischievously: “Except they are a bit, aren’t they? They’re all just bloody public schoolboys!”

She has at least five new movies coming up, including a revamp of Brighton Rock and an American brothel movie made with Hackford called Love Ranch (she plays the madam, naturally). She’s also shooting the comic book adaptation Red, playing a retired CIA agent called back into action by Bruce Willis. This means, she groans, that she’s going to have to start working out in the gym. “I should be going to the gym now but I just don’t want to do it. I don’t do anything like that regularly at all. But because I’m filming, I should.”

She doesn’t search for happiness in her life, like the Holy Grail, but simply goes through phases of it, aware that it’s something that comes and goes. She says that she tries not to think of her own mortality, but that as she gets older “it gets darker, there is no question about that. You just say: ‘It’s going to happen and it’s going to happen to everybody’.”

She says that, best of all, she has moments of reflection. “It’s nice to look back and remember, and to think, ‘Wow! I’ve had a fantastic life, it’s been brilliant!’” She lets it hang there, in the air, for another nanosecond, and dryly qualifies: “Or else you think, ‘Oh, thank God that’s all over!’ ”

The Last Station is released on Feb 19</font></span>

<span style="font-size:1.5pt;"><b><font face="Tahoma">http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article7023917.ece</font></b></span></p>