In LA, she is “very ungregarious, a bit of a loner. I have family there now
[her nephew and stepsons, she never wanted children of her own], so I see
them. When I’m out, I love it, but when the moment comes to go out, I wish I
could stay in. I’m superuncool, a nerdy person, always embarrassed and
inept, and not Kate Moss basically.”
Although she came to prominence in the Sixties, and benefited from the
meritocratic aspects of that decade, such as they were, she says she is “not
really a Sixties figure”. She was, she says, “a serial monogamist... All my
friends were smoking dope, but I was the one who’d go to rehearsals at ten
in the morning and then do a show at night.” A rebel who held it together?
“Yes,” she agrees, then changes her mind. “No, I wasn’t a rebel, I was
always a good girl.”
With the emphasis on girl. “I’m not an old-school feminist, I never was. I was
always a new-school feminist, if you like. I was a feminist who wanted to
wear gold high-heeled shoes and bustier tops and I didn’t see a conflict
there and I still don’t.” What does she make of, say, Paris Hilton? “I don’t
applaud Paris Hilton,” she starts to say, “no, but actually I do. I think
she’s pretty cool. She’s developed, like Princess Diana, that deliberate
foolishness which is disarming.”
Doesn’t that depress her, though? “No. I like girlie stuff. You can talk about
football and cars endlessly and unbelievably boringly, why can’t you talk
about shoes and shopping and still earn as much as a bloke? I find,” she
adds, “both exaggerated maleness and exaggerated femaleness a bit boring,
but I don’t judge between the one and the other. To me, Jeremy Clarkson and
Paris Hilton are one and the same, because they’re both very smart and
deliberately milking it.” She is about to guest on Top Gear. “I
must remember to tell Jeremy he reminds me of Paris Hilton.”
The role of Elizabeth II, she found, she says, “weirdly easy. It’s often the
way; when things come peculiarly easily, you’re doing it right. You think
you don’t deserve it, but it’s informed by all the work you did before.”
What prepared her for the role? “Years of getting it wrong, being lazy. You
have to put the work in. You can’t wing it.” Emotionally, she drew on her
feelings about her parents’ generation, “Although she [the Queen] is younger
than them, the world she came out of was my parents’ experience, that sense
of tradition and stoicism. I found it very moving to inhabit that.”
I ask where her obvious admiration for Elizabeth Windsor leaves her professed republicanism.
“I’m not quite sure. You still look at the Royal Family and go, ‘Oh, for
God’s sake! It’s ridiculous!’ But in its ridiculousness I have a very soft
spot for it.” The institution? Or her? “For her, and to a certain extent for
the institution. You throw things out at your peril. Just to arbitrarily go,
‘Oh, we’ve had enough of that’ and boot it out is kind of infantile.” She
doesn’t regret her “I give you the Queen” toast in her speech on Oscar
night. “Ah, f*** it, no. It was a joke. I’m not that tight-arsed about
anything.”
Not much danger of the Queen being booted out at the moment, anyway, thanks in
part to the PR instincts of Tony Blair a decade ago, as detailed in the
film, and thanks also to Mirren herself, who managed to pull off the
sensationally unlikely trick of turning an elderly frumpy conservative
countrywoman into someone not only sympathetic, but dangerously close to
cool. Would she still call herself a republican? “I don’t think I am a
republican any more, no,” she says. “But I do look at that whole class
system; that whole class are just,” she searches for the words, “absurd and
horrible.”
She shivers. “You might be one of them, Robert,” she says, “you probably are.”
I say I’m not, even though (all professionalism abandoned as I sense my
opening) I look like a Russian prince. “You do!” she says, “Sandy and I were
both gobstruck!” (Sandy is Mirren’s pal and personal assistant. She also had
a thing with this Galitzine character.) “Your nose is a pointy Russian nose
exactly like Georgie’s father’s!” We break off (forgive the indulgence) to
eat chocolate cake and talk about my nose.
The Galitzines, Mirren explains, my stomach and ego sufficiently stoked for
the time being, “came out with money. The Mironovs didn’t.” In any case,
“the Galitzines were a very royal family. We were more Chekovian upper
middle class, gentry. Her grandfather, a Tsarist army officer, was in London
negotiating an arms deal when the revolution stranded him in 1917. So it’s
wrong to say she is descended from Russian aristocrats? “Well, my great
grandmother was a countess.”
Her grandfather, and then her father, became taxi drivers. Her mother is from
the East End of London. Mirren was born Ilyena Mironov, in 1945. They lived
first in Westcliff, then in Leigh, just up the road from where we are now.
She likes coming back. “It’s more familiar to me here than anywhere else in
the world. The street names, the architecture, the place names, the smell,
the place you grew up gets into your subconscious.”
Down at the front for the photos, the grey sky low over the estuary, boats
drawn up on the sand, the wind whipping her scarf, day trippers
double-taking as she emerges from a chauffeured black BMW, Mirren watches a
bunch of teenagers smoking under a jetty. “That was me, 45 years ago. I
suppose you want me to show you where I had my first snog?” she groans. I
say sure. “Well, I absolutely did not snog in Southend.”
She shows me the Victorian square where her friend Jenny lived. “She was
beautiful. I was very much the second banana.” Her parents, in any event,
were quite strict. “I wasn’t allowed on a date until I was 17.” In the
Sixties, she’d go to the Shrubbery, a coffee bar, still there, now called
the Terrace. Earlier in childhood, “The most delicious thing in the world
was a scoop of Rossi’s ice-cream dropped into a cherryade.” With these cosy
memories, she is safe and solid and Anglo, sharing the same moral universe
as Jane Tennison, her most well-known character. And yet, on stage and
screen (and I’m guessing in real life, too), she can be moody, intense,
dangerous, seductive, as exotic as Cleopatra, her most celebrated stage
role. Perhaps it is this combination that explains her appeal.
“My sister and I have what we call our Russian moments,” she says, “sort of
soulful.” As an adolescent, her Russianness “was an awkward thing you didn’t
mention. My grandfather spoke to my father in Russian and he would answer in
English [hence, she never learnt Russian]. As far as he was concerned, there
was no going back.”
And yet, for his daughters, 90 years after the family left, there has been a
going back. Earlier this year Mirren and her elder sister Kate visited the
former Mironov estate near Smolensk that their grandfather had told them
about as children. “He’d show me this map he’d made: this is where the rose
garden was, this is where the stables were. He was intensely homesick.” The
current owner, a young businessman who turned up with four bodyguards, said
“Welcome to my land” to the Mirren sisters. “I replied ‘No, welcome to my
land’,” says Mirren. If Russia were in the European Union, she says (she
quaintly calls it the Common Market), “Kate and I could say, ‘I’m sorry,
this is ours.’ Not that we’d dream of it. Once he realised we weren’t going
to claim it, the owner said, ‘I would like to offer you a piece of land to
build a house.’” With homes in London, LA, New York and the south of France,
she hardly needs another one on the Russian Steppe.
The original house had been destroyed long ago, she says. “But you can’t
destroy a landscape; the trees, the rivers, the endless plain.” Indeed, no,
I say, trying to sound all mournful and Slavic, half-convincing myself that
my own forebears’ tracts of the Motherland had also been swept away by the
march of history. As and when we next meet, which I very much hope we will,
I’m going to grow a moustache, get a cloak, maybe a sword, dress up like
Pushkin or Tolstoy, inhabit the role fully.
In the Frame: My Life in Words and Pictures by Helen Mirren (£20,
Weidenfeld & Nicolson). Helen Mirren will be speaking at the Cheltenham Book
Festival on October 7. Tickets are £12 (01242 227979; www.cheltenhamfestivals.com
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