Helen Mirren is smiling as the accolades and compliments tumble down around her glossy, flicky, blow-dried hair. “Being me right now is sort of amazing,” she admits. So rosy is her world that, at the press conference for the new Prime Suspect (with Jane Tennison, alcoholic and depressed, contemplating an unwanted retirement) when the star accidentally lets slip that her character will be killed off, she simply laughs — “Oh, f***” — and the room laughs with her. To be here, sipping a second glass of chilled champagne, on the eve of the premiere of The Queen, with an Emmy banked for Elizabeth I, is a pleasure she intends to relish. “Should I be drinking this?” the 61-year-old asks. She is in a playful mood today.
We have met twice before, and although she has always been friendly and funny, there was a vague undercurrent of discontent with her life. Of course, that life seemed enviable, with its glamorous men, including Liam Neeson, and her enthronement as a seductive national treasure: the sexpot who never simpered, whose wrinkles never mattered. How many other theatrical dames over 60 (such as Dench, Smith or Atkins) could muster a sexual frisson as Mirren does today, in her figure-skimming blue suit and fabulous beige T-bar high heels? A few years ago, she told me she would always think of herself as a “struggling actress”, no matter how brilliant her reviews and starry her parts, but the insecurity has dissolved in a warm shower of approbation, especially for her role as the Queen.
Mirren portrays a woman confronted by the dislike of a nation whose warmth and support she had taken for granted. “I have never been hated like that before,” she says, on learning that a quarter of her subjects want her to step aside. What the actress examines is the reluctant change of heart HM undergoes, a journey from the stubborn refusal to bend to the demands of a hysterical public to the painful understanding that times have changed and that she is required to “ perform” emotions she prefers to keep private.
The performance won Mirren the best-actress award and a standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival, and is tipped for an Oscar, her third nomination, after Gosford Park and The Madness of King George. This is her best shot at winning an award to accessorise the formidable red-carpet style that was on display when she collected her Emmy in a diaphanous white gown and plastic stripper shoes. You sense that this time it matters more.
She loves a chance to doll up, but also likes us to remember that she has been a respected classical actress since her Cleopatra for the National Youth Theatre at 18, and has waited 40 years for this moment of glory. “I know,” she says, “it’s sort of incredible it should happen at my age, but my abilities were not fulfilled by the roles I got in my thirties. I was frustrated; I wasn’t taken seriously. I wasn’t pretty enough be a movie star — I didn’t have a good-enough body or legs. But I was a little too sexy or whatever to be thought of as a substantial person. Thirty years ago, attitudes were monstrous, sexist. They couldn’t see beyond the blonde-big-tits thing.”
It was DCI Tennison who, in 1991, rescued Mirren from the trials of a smouldering reputation. The show’s relentless realism and brutal lighting showed every line and sagging facial muscle, but she welcomed every unflattering close-up. In the seventh, and final, episode, she looks more ropey than ever, haunted by sadness as her father lies dying, and by the emptiness of a life consumed by career.
“It’s always been important to me to play Jane at the age I’m at, to keep it all real,” she says. “A lot of women end up like her. In the thrill of driving on a career, they let go of family connections and suddenly, one day, say, ‘Where is life? Where is everyone?’ The first Prime Suspect was a liberation for me — everyone said it was so brave — but I look at it now and think I look rather gorgeous. I mind less and less what I look like on screen. For The Queen, I had to hold my head in a certain way to give myself a double chin. I loved that.”
When she wore a dark wig as a younger actress, people remarked on Mirren’s resemblance to Princess Margaret, so she is not surprised at how easily she transformed into a frumpy, well-rounded grandma with a radiant but strictly rationed smile — though she regrets not doing justice to Lilibet’s legs. “Nobody ever notices she has gorgeous legs. I’m embarrassed to have let her down with my Kevin Keegan knees.” She sticks out a pair of perfectly nice legs in tan tights.
To prepare, she studied endless video tapes and stuck up pictures of the Queen in her trailer. The huge glasses, the heathery twinsets and tweeds (no nudity required, only a succession of full-length nighties), the padding, to amplify her slim hips, and the luxurious bespoke dresses all helped Mirren to feel her way into the skin of an imperious, pampered, elderly woman. What neither she nor the director, Stephen Frears, nor the writer, Peter Morgan, could be sure about was the truth of the private dialogues and actions to which their film lays claim. How do we know Philip calls his wife Cabbage? “We don’t,” Mirren answers flatly. “I heard he calls her Sausage, which I like better.” She did not start the film feeling sympathetic toward her subject, but she ended it “in love” with her. “You have to start engaging with them; you need empathy to see their world from inside out.”
In 1996, Mirren was quoted as saying that one of the reasons she “hated” the royal family was that they took insufficient trouble to marry the right people.
In general, she has always been what she describes as “a bit of a leftie”. In the 1970s, she attended a Workers Revolutionary Party meeting in Nottingham, where her heart soared as “good people spoke about the problems of unionising hotel workers”. But after the tragedy of August 1997, she felt supportive of the Windsors. “I remember thinking, ‘It’s their private business — they are going through an unbelievable trauma.’”
By the time she came to make The Queen, had she lost her anti-royalist feeling? “Mostly,” she muses, “though it is still lurking in there. I still hate the British class system. I hate those drunken toffs at Annabel’s. I have never been to Annabel’s, but I imagine them all and I’d like to line them all up against a wall. They are nauseating in their sense of entitlement.”
Mirren has a lovely contrary quality: instead of mouthing grateful platitudes about the film that will probably become her best-remembered work, she tells you how she thinks Morgan and Frears got it wrong at times. The Queen’s coldness toward Charles in his grief, her stark dismissal of his opinions and requests, she sees as unfair and untrue. “From watching film of them, and my research, I think they have a warm relationship. Princess Anne was really angry, in an interview, about the suggestion that her mother had been cold and withdrawn, and I believed her.” Nor was she convinced the Queen would have said “Maybe I should step aside” to her mother. “I did argue about it, but it’s not my film. Also, because she feels herself to be a God-anointed queen, I very much wanted a scene with her praying. I forced Stephen to shoot it, but I couldn’t force him to use it.”
When not being fêted at glittering premieres, the actress once described by the former RSC artistic director Adrian Noble as “the queen in exile” lives a life of low-key domesticity in her London Docklands home, with visits to her house in West Hollywood (“not Beverly Hills”), and thanks the rise of the Big Brother celebrity for deflecting the paparazzi heat from actors: “They aren’t interested in me putting the rubbish out.” Eight years into a late, happy marriage to the director-producer Taylor Hackford, she loves having a husband to share her limelight the way she shared his last year when his Ray Charles biopic, Ray, was nominated for awards. Frankly, she can take or leave her new status in Tinseltown, where she once felt miserable and eclipsed. She has made it on her own terms, in her own country, has never waited tables or chased career-enhancing romances and has reached an age where the medals of prestige and veteran service are prized affirmations rather than Establishment sops.
In 2003, she became a DBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list. Was it embarrassing or thrilling? “Oh, both, but for the daughter of an immigrant and asylum-seeker, it was an incredible honour.” As she drives around London, she scouts for the perfect site for monuments to her two queens. “I want to see statues of the young Elizabeths looking at each other across history in their coronation robes. I can’t get my head around that sense of duty that is beyond vanity and ego, into a place where you have no choice, but never complain about it.”
The former republican has more than returned the compliment of her DBE award by giving the royal family a public-relations boost that not even the smartest palace flunky could have engineered. “I hope she sees my performance as heartfelt and honest,” she says. “Whatever she thinks of the film as a whole, I hope she can see that I did my best for her.”
Prime Suspect, ITV1, Oct 15 and 22
