NOTHING LIKE A DAME

Helen Mirren on sex and a life on screen (Demetrios Matheou, 03 August 2003, Sunday
Herald)

IT took a while for Britain to wake up to Helen Mirren, to afford her the respect and affection that it now does. The voracious wild child who burst on to the theatre scene with the Royal Shakespeare Company in the Sixties, then starred in such arty fare as Ken Russell's Savage Messiah (1972) or Lindsay Anderson's O Lucky Man! (1973), didn't enjoy the instant rapport with audiences of, say, Kate Winslet. There was something too wilfully maverick about her, something self-contained. On screen she would dare everything -- not least nudity -- but didn't belong to anyone. Helen Mirren was always her own woman.

But the first series of crime drama Prime Suspect (1991) took her into prime time and the public's consciousness in a way none of her films had. As the no-nonsense, short-tempered loner DCI Jane Tennison, she was playing her age, early-40s, without the faintest pretence to glamour or sweetness – and thereby won a legion of fans, both adoring males and women who saw her as a feminist icon. This time the critical plaudits she'd always had for her work seemed to make more waves -- not least the Oscar nominations for The Madness Of King George (1994) and Gosford Park (2001). And when, in June, she was made a Dame in the Queen's Birthday Honours List, Mirren's place as one of the country's most celebrated -- and now most loved -- actresses was assured. [...]

She was born Ilyena Lydia Mironoff, granddaughter of a White Russian general who came to England to buy arms for the Russo-Japanese war, then found himself stranded (or, as Mirren contemporises it, he and his family became asylum-seekers) when the Russian revolution started behind him. Her father was two years old.

The role in King George is pretty thankless, mostly moaning about his fate, but her work in Prime Suspect may be the best ever done for television by an actress, as she makes a difficult character quite compelling. MORE: -FILMOGRAPHY: Helen Mirren (IMDB.com) -AUDIO: Mirren Returns to PBS' 'Prime Suspect' (NPR Morning Edition, April 9, 2004) Posted by Orrin Judd at August 30, 2003 10:01 AM