Helen Mirren Biography

Dame Helen Lydia Mirren, (née Mironoff; born 26 July 1945), is an English actor. Mirren has won an Academy Award, four BAFTAs, three Golden Globes, four Emmy Awards, and two Cannes Film Festival Best Actress Awards. In 2003, she received a damehood for services to the performing arts at a ceremony at Buckingham Palace.

Mirren began her acting career with the Royal Shakespeare Company in the latter half of the 1960s. From her very first film appearance (playing the young muse to a middle-aged artist in 1969's Age of Consent), Mirren displayed the overtly sensual screen persona that would become her trademark. Other early movies included O Lucky Man! (1973), Excalibur (1981) and The Long Good Friday (1982).

During her career, she has portrayed three British queens in different films and television series: Elizabeth I in the television series Elizabeth I (2005), for which she received Emmy and Golden Globe Awards for Best Actress, Elizabeth II in The Queen (2006), which won her the Academy and BAFTA Award for Best Actress, and Queen Charlotte in The Madness of King George (1994), for which she earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. She is the only actress ever to have portrayed both Queens Elizabeth on the screen.

Mirren played the no-nonsense police detective Jane Tennison on the praised ITV series Prime Suspect for a total of seven seasons from 1991 to 2006, and won numerous awards for the role, including BAFTA and Emmy awards.

Making her West End stage debut in the 1970s, Mirren returned to the London stage most recently in 2013, playing Queen Elizabeth II for the second time in a play titled The Audience. Mirren was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in January 2013. In April 2013, she was awarded best actress at the Laurence Olivier Awards for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II in The Audience.

Early life and family

Mirren was born Helen Lydia Mironoff in Queen Charlotte's Hospital, Hammersmith, London. Her father, Vasiliy Petrovich Mironov (1913"1980), was of Russian origin, originally from Kuryanovo, Smolensk Oblast, and her mother, Kitty (née Kathleen Alexandrina Eva Matilda Rogers; 1909"1996), was English. Mirren's paternal grandfather, Colonel Pyotr Vasilievich Mironov, was in the Imperial Russian Army and fought in the 1904 Russo-Japanese War. He later became a diplomat, and was negotiating an arms deal in Britain when he and his family were stranded during the Russian Revolution. The former diplomat became a London cab driver to support his family and eventually settled down in England.

His son, Helen Mirren's father, changed the family name to Mirren in the 1950s and became known as Basil Mirren. He played the viola with the London Philharmonic before World War II, and later drove a taxi cab and was a driving-test examiner, before becoming a civil servant with the Ministry of Transport. Mirren's mother was a working-class Londoner from West Ham, East London, and was the 13th of 14 children born to a butcher whose own father had been the butcher to Queen Victoria. Mirren considers her upbringing to have been "very anti-monarchist". Mirren was the second of three children; she was born two years after her older sister Katherine ("Kate"; born 1942), and has a younger brother, who was named Peter Basil after his grandfather and great-great-grandfather. Mirren was brought up in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex.

Education

Mirren attended St Bernard's High School for Girls in Southend-on-Sea, where she acted in school productions, and subsequently a teaching college, the New College of Speech and Drama in London, "housed within Anna Pavlova's old home, Ivy House" on the North End Road " which leads from Golders Green to Hampstead, N. London. Aged eighteen, she auditioned for the National Youth Theatre and was accepted. By the time she was 20, she was playing Cleopatra in the NYT production of Antony and Cleopatra at the Old Vic, which led to her signing with the agent Al Parker.

Theatre

Early years

As a result of her work for the NYT, Mirren was invited to join the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). While with the RSC, she played Castiza in Trevor Nunn's 1966 staging of The Revenger's Tragedy, Diana in All's Well That Ends Well (1967), Cressida in Troilus and Cressida (1968), Phebe in As You Like It (1968), Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1970), Tatiana in Gorky's Enemies at the Aldwych (1971), and the title role in Miss Julie at The Other Place (1971). She also appeared in four productions, directed by Braham Murray for Century Theatre at the University Theatre in Manchester, between 1965 and 1967.

In 1970, the director/producer John Goldschmidt made a documentary film, Doing Her Own Thing, about Mirren during her time with the Royal Shakespeare Company. The film was made for ATV and shown on the ITV Network in the UK.

In 1972 and 1973, Mirren worked with Peter Brook's International Centre for Theatre Research, and joined the group's tour in North Africa and the US, during which they created The Conference of the Birds. She then rejoined the RSC, playing Lady Macbeth at Stratford in 1974 and at the Aldwych Theatre in 1975.

It was reported by Sally Beauman, in her 1982 history of the RSC, that Mirren"?while appearing in Nunn's Macbeth (1974), and in a highly publicised letter to The Guardian newspaper"?had sharply criticized both the National Theatre and the RSC for their lavish production expenditure, declaring it "unnecessary and destructive to the art of the Theatre," and adding, "The realms of truth, emotion and imagination reached for in acting a great play have become more and more remote, often totally unreachable across an abyss of costume and technicalities..." According to Beauman, there were no discernible repercussions for this rebuke of the RSC.

West End and RSC

At the Royal Court Theatre in September 1975, she played the role of a rock star named Maggie in Teeth 'n' Smiles, a musical play by David Hare; she reprised the role the following year in a revival of the play at Wyndham's Theatre in May 1976. Her performance earned her the London critics' Plays & Players Best Actress award.

Beginning in November 1975, Mirren played in West End repertory with the Lyric Theatre Company as Nina in The Seagull and Ella in Ben Travers' new farce The Bed Before Yesterday ("Mirren is stirringly voluptuous as the Harlowesque good-time girl": Michael Billington, The Guardian, 10 December 1975). At the RSC in Stratford in 1977, and at the Aldwych the following year, she played a steely Queen Margaret in Terry Hands' production of the three parts of Henry VI, while 1979 saw her 'bursting with grace', and winning acclaim for her performance as Isabella in Peter Gill's production of Measure for Measure at Riverside Studios.

In 1981, she returned to the Royal Court for the London premiere of Brian Friel's Faith Healer. That same year she also won acclaim for her performance in the title role of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, a production of Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre which was later transferred to The Roundhouse in Chalk Farm, London. Reviewing her portrayal for The Sunday Telegraph, Francis King wrote: "Miss Mirren never leaves it in doubt that even in her absences, this ardent, beautiful woman is the most important character of the story."

In her performance as Moll Cutpurse in The Roaring Girl"?at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in January 1983, and at the Barbican Theatre in April 1983"?she was described as having "swaggered through the action with radiant singularity of purpose, filling in areas of light and shade that even Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker omitted." " Michael Coveney, Financial Times, April 1983.

After a relatively barren sojourn in the Hollywood Hills, she returned to England at the beginning of 1989 to co-star with Bob Peck at the Young Vic in the London premiere of the Arthur Miller double-bill, Two Way Mirror, performances which prompted Miller to remark: "What is so good about English actors is that they are not afraid of the open expression of large emotions" (interview by Sheridan Morley: The Times 11 January 1989). In Elegy for a Lady she played the svelte proprietress of a classy boutique, while as the blonde hooker in Some Kind of Love Story she was "clad in a Freudian slip and shifting easily from waif-like vulnerability to sexual aggression, giving the role a breathy Monroesque quality" (Michael Billington, The Guardian).

On 15 February 2013, at the Gielgud Theatre she began a turn as Elizabeth II in the World Premiere of Peter Morgan's The Audience. The show will be directed by Stephen Daldry. In April she was named best actress at the Olivier Awards for her part.

Broadway debut

A further stage breakthrough came in 1994, in an Yvonne Arnaud Theatre production bound for the West End, when Bill Bryden cast her as Natalya Petrovna in Ivan Turgenev's A Month in the Country. Her co-stars were John Hurt as her aimless lover Rakitin and Joseph Fiennes in only his second professional stage appearance as the cocksure young tutor Belyaev. "Instead of a bored Natalya fretting the summer away in dull frocks, Mirren, dazzlingly gowned, is a woman almost wilfully allowing her heart's desire for her son's young tutor to rule her head and wreak domestic havoc....Creamy shoulders bared, she feels free to launch into a gloriously enchanted, dreamily comic self-confession of love." (John Thaxter, Richmond & Twickenham Times, 4 March 1994).

Mirren was twice nominated for Broadway's Tony Award as Best Actress (Play): in 1995 for her Broadway debut in A Month in the Country, now directed by Scott Ellis ("Miss Mirren's performance is bigger and more animated than the one she gave last year in an entirely different London production", Vincent Canby in the NY Times, 26 April 1995). Then again in 2002 for August Strindberg's Dance of Death, co-starring with Sir Ian McKellen, their fraught rehearsal period coinciding with the terrorist attacks on New York on 11 September 2001 (as recorded in her In the Frame autobiography, September 2007).

National Theatre

Mirren had an unhappy experience at the National Theatre in 1998 when she played Cleopatra to Alan Rickman's Antony. In 2000 Nicholas Hytner, who had worked with Mirren on the film version of The Madness of King George, cast her as Lady Torrance in his revival of Tennessee Williams' Orpheus Descending at the Donmar Warehouse in London. Michael Billington, reviewing for The Guardian, described her performance as "an exemplary study of an immigrant woman who has acquired a patina of resilient toughness but who slowly acknowledges her sensuality."

At the National Theatre in November 2003 she again won praise playing Christine Mannon ("defiantly cool, camp and skittish", Evening Standard; "glows with mature sexual allure", Daily Telegraph) in a revival of Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra directed by Howard Davies.

"This production was one of the best experiences of my professional life, The play was four and a half hours long, and I have never known that kind of response from an audience ... It was the serendipity of a beautifully cast play, with great design and direction, It will be hard to be in anything better." (In the Frame, September 2007).

She played the tragic title role in Jean Racine's Phèdre at the National in 2009, in a production directed by Nicholas Hytner. The production was also staged at the amphitheater of Epidaurus on 11 and 12 July 2009.

Film

Mirren has also appeared in a large number of films throughout her career. Some of her earlier film appearances include roles in Midsummer Night's Dream, Age of Consent, O Lucky Man!, Caligula, Excalibur, 2010, The Long Good Friday, White Nights, When the Whales Came and The Mosquito Coast. She appeared in Some Mother's Son, Painted Lady, The Prince of Egypt and The Madness of King George. One of her other film roles was in Peter Greenaway's The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, as the eponymous thief's wife, opposite Michael Gambon. In Teaching Mrs. Tingle she plays sadistic History teacher, Mrs Eve Tingle. In 2007 she claimed director Michael Winner had treated her "like a piece of meat" at a casting call in 1964. Asked about the incident, Winner told The Guardian: "I don't remember asking her to turn around but if I did I wasn't being serious. I was only doing what the [casting] agent asked me - and for this I get reviled! Helen's a lovely person, she's a great actress and I'm a huge fan, but her memory of that moment is a little flawed."

Mirren continued her successful film career when she starred more recently in Gosford Park with Maggie Smith and Calendar Girls where she starred with Julie Walters. Other more recent appearances include The Clearing, Pride, Raising Helen, and Shadowboxer. Mirren also provided the voice for the supercomputer "Deep Thought" in the film adaptation of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. During her career, she has portrayed three British queens in different films and television series: Elizabeth I in the television series Elizabeth I (2005), Elizabeth II in The Queen (2006), and Queen Charlotte, the wife of George III, in The Madness of King George (1994). She is the only actress ever to have portrayed both Queens Elizabeth on the screen.

Mirren's title role of The Queen earned her numerous acting awards including a BAFTA, a Golden Globe, and an Academy Award, among many others. During her acceptance speech at the Academy Award ceremony, she praised and thanked Elizabeth II and stated that she had maintained her dignity and weathered many storms during her reign as Queen. Mirren later appeared in supporting roles in the films National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets, Inkheart, State of Play, and The Last Station, for which she was nominated for an Oscar.

In preparation for her role as a retired Israeli Mossad agent in the film The Debt, Mirren reportedly immersed herself in studies of Hebrew language, Jewish history, and Holocaust writing, including the life of Simon Wiesenthal, while in Israel in 2009 for the filming of some of the movie's scenes. The film is a remake of a 2007 Israeli film of the same name (Hebrew: Ha-khov).

She played Alfred Hitchcock's wife Alma in the 2012 biopic Hitchcock, about the making of Psycho.

Television

Mirren is known for her role as detective Jane Tennison in the widely viewed Prime Suspect, a multiple award-winning television drama series that was noted for its high quality and popularity. Her portrayal of Tennison won her three consecutive BAFTA Awards for Best Actress between 1992 and 1994.

Some of Mirren's other television performances include Cousin Bette (1971); As You Like It (1979); Blue Remembered Hills (1979); The Twilight Zone episode "Dead Woman's Shoes" (1985); The Passion of Ayn Rand (1999), where her performance won her both the Emmy and the Golden Globe; Door to Door (2002); and The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (2003). In 1976, she appeared with Laurence Olivier, Alan Bates and Malcolm McDowell in a production of Harold Pinter's The Collection as part of the Laurence Olivier Presents series. She also played Elizabeth I in 2005, in the television serial Elizabeth I, for Channel 4 and HBO, for which she received an Emmy Award. Mirren won another Emmy Award on 16 September 2007 for her role in Prime Suspect: The Final Act on PBS in the same category as in 2006.

Mirren hosted Saturday Night Live on 9 April 2011.

Awards and recognition

Personal life

Mirren lived with actor Liam Neeson during the early 1980s. They had met whilst working on Excalibur (1981). Interviewed by James Lipton for Inside the Actors Studio, Neeson said she was instrumental in his getting an agent.

Mirren married American director Taylor Hackford (her partner since 1986) on 31 December 1997, his 53rd birthday. The ceremony took place at the Ardersier Parish Church near Inverness in the Scottish Highlands. The couple had met on the set of White Nights. It is her first marriage, and his third (he has two children from his previous marriages). Mirren has no children and says she has "no maternal instinct whatsoever."

Mirren's autobiography, In the Frame: My Life in Words and Pictures, was published in the UK by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in September 2007. Reviewing for The Stage, John Thaxter wrote: "Sumptuously illustrated, at first sight it looks like another of those photo albums of the stars. But between the pictures there are almost 200 pages of densely printed text, an unusually frank story of her private and professional life, mainly in the theatre, the words clearly Mirren's own, delivered with forthright candour."

In 1990, Mirren stated in an interview that she is an atheist. In the August 2011 issue of Esquire magazine, Mirren said, "I am quite spiritual. I believed in fairies when I was a child. I still do sort of believe in the fairies. And the leprechauns. But I don't believe in God."

In a GQ interview in 2008, Mirren stated she had been date raped as a student and had often taken cocaine at parties in her 20s, and until the 1980s. She stopped using the drug after reading the (debunked) tabloid tale that Klaus Barbie made a living from cocaine dealing.

On 11 May 2010, Mirren attended the unveiling of her waxwork at Madame Tussauds London. The figure reportedly cost £150,000 to make and took four months to complete.

Mirren was listed as one of the fifty best-dressed over 50s by the Guardian in March 2013.

In August 2013, Mirren was announced as one of several new models for Marks & Spencer's 'Womanism' campaign.

References in pop culture

• The Mars Volta on their 2008 album The Bedlam in Goliath have a song called "Ilyena" that is named after Mirren. Mars Volta lyricist/singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala has stated an affinity for Mirren.

Filmography

Film and television credits

Year	Title	Role	Notes
1967	Herostratus
1968	'	Hermia
1969	Red Hot Shot
	Age of Consent	Cora Ryan
1972	Miss Julie	Miss Julie
	Savage Messiah	Gosh Boyle
1973	O Lucky Man!	Patricia
1975	Caesar and Claretta	Claretta Petacci
1976	Hamlet	Ophelia/Gertrude
1979	'	Joanne	A segment of ITV Playhouse
	Caligula	Caesonia
1980	Hussy	Beaty
	'	Alice Rage
	'	Victoria
1981	Excalibur	Morgana
1984	Cal	Marcella
	2010	Tanya Kirbuk
	Faerie Tale Theatre: "The Little Mermaid"	Princess Amelia	TV series: 1 episode
1985	Heavenly Pursuits	Ruth Chancellor
	Coming Through	Frieda von Richthofen Weekley
	White Nights	Galina Ivanova
1986	'	Mother Fox
1988	Pascali's Island	Lydia Neuman
1989	When the Whales Came	Clemmie Jenkins
	'	Georgina Spica
1990	Bethune: The Making of a Hero	Frances Penny Bethune
	'	Caroline
1991	Prime Suspect	Jane Tennison	TV series
	Where Angels Fear to Tread	Lilia Herriton
1993	'	Annie Marsh
	Royal Deceit	Geruth
1994	'	Queen Charlotte
1995	'	Snow Queen	(voice)
1996	Some Mother's Son	Kathleen Quigley	Also Associate Producer
	Losing Chase	Chase Phillips	TV
1997	Critical Care	Stella
1998	Sidoglio Smithee
	Tracey Takes On...	Professor Horen	TV series: 1 episode
	'	The Queen	(voice)
1999	'	Ayn Rand
	Teaching Mrs. Tingle	Mrs. Eve Tingle
2000	Greenfingers	Georgina Woodhouse
2001	'	Doctor
	No Such Thing	The Boss
	Happy Birthday	Distinguished Woman	Also Director
	Last Orders	Amy
	Gosford Park	Mrs. Wilson
2003	'	Karen Stone	TV
	Calendar Girls	Chris Harper
2004	'	Eileen Hayes
	Raising Helen	Dominique
2005	'	Deep Thought	(voice)
	Elizabeth I	Queen Elizabeth I
	Shadowboxer	Rose
2006	'	Queen Elizabeth II
2007	National Treasure: Book of Secrets	Emily Appleton
2008	Inkheart	Elinor Loredan
2009	State of Play	Cameron Lynne
	'	Sofya Tolstoy
2010	Love Ranch	Grace Bontempo
	'	Prospera
	Brighton Rock	Ida
	RED	Victoria Winslow
	Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole	Nyra	(voice)
	Saturday Night Live	Herself	TV (cameo)
2011	Arthur	Lillian Hobson
	Saturday Night Live	Herself (host)	TV
	'	Rachel Singer
2012	The Door	Emerenc
	Glee	Voice of Becky Jackson	TV
	Hitchcock	Alma Reville
2013	Phil Spector	Linda Kenney Baden	TV film
	Monsters University	Dean Hardscrabble	Voice role
	RED 2	Victoria Winslow

Selected stage credits

• Cleopatra, Anthony and Cleopatra, Old Vic Theatre, London, 1965
• Cathleen, Long Day's Journey Into Night, Century Theatre, Manchester,England 1965
• Kitty, Charley's Aunt, Century Theatre, Manchester, 1967
• Nerissa, The Merchant of Venice, Century Theatre,Manchester, 1967
• Castiza, The Revenger's Tragedy, Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford-upon-Avon, England, 1967
• Diana, All's Well That Ends Well, Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1967
• Cressida, Troilus and Cressida, Royal Shakespeare Company, Aldwych Theatre, London, 1968
• Hero, Much Ado about Nothing, Aldwych Theatre, 1968"1969
• Win-the-Fight Littlewit, Bartholomew Fair, Aldwych Theatre, 1969
• Lady Anne, Richard III, Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1970
• Ophelia, Hamlet, Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1970
• Julia, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1970
• Tatyana, Enemies, Royal Shakespeare Company, Aldwych Theatre, 1971
• Harriet, The Man of Mode, Royal Shakespeare Company, Aldwych Theatre, 1971
• Title role, Miss Julie, Royal Shakespeare Company, Aldwych Theatre, 1971
• Elayne, The Balcony, Royal Shakespeare Company, Aldwych Theatre, 1971
• Isabella, Measure for Measure, Riverside Studios Theatre, London,1974
• Lady Macbeth, Macbeth, Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1974, then Aldwych Theatre, 1975
• Maggie, Teeth 'n' Smiles, Royal Court Theatre, London, 1975, then Wyndham's Theatre, London, 1976
• Nina, The Seagull, Lyric Theatre, London, 1975
• Ella, The Bed before Yesterday, Lyric Theatre, 1975
• Queen Margaret, Henry VI, Parts I, II and III, Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1977, then Aldwych Theatre, 1978
• Title role, The Duchess of Malfi, Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, England, 1980, then The Roundhouse, London, 1981
• Grace, Faith Healer, Royal Court Theatre, 1981
• Cleopatra, Antony and Cleopatra, Pit Theatre, London, 1983
• Moll Cutpurse, The Roaring Girl, Barbican Theatre, London, 1983
• Marjorie, Extremities, Duchess Theatre, London, 1984
• Madame Bovary, 1987
• Angela, "Some Kind of Love Story," and dying woman, "Elegy for a Lady," in Two-Way Mirror (double-bill), Young Vic Theatre, *London, 1989
• Sex Please We're Italian, 1991
• Natalya Petrovna, A Month in the Country, London, 1994, then Criterion Theatre, New York City, 1995
• Antony and Cleopatra, Royal National Theatre, London, 1998
• Collected Stories, London, 1999
• Lady Torrance, Orpheus Descending, Donmar Warehouse, London, 2000
• Alice, Dance of Death, Broadhurst Theatre, New York City, 2001"2002
• Mourning Becomes Electra, Lyttelton Stage, Royal National Theatre, 2003
• Phedre, National Theatre, 2009
• Also appeared as Susie Monmican, The Silver Lassie; in Woman in Mind, Los Angeles.
• Queen Elizabeth II, The Audience, The Gielgud Theatre, London, 2013.

Further reading

• Command Performance, a profile of Helen Mirren written by John Lahr in The New Yorker magazine, 2 October 2006
• In the Frame: My Life in Words and Pictures (autobiography) by Helen Mirren, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2007 ISBN 978-0-297-85197-4.
  • Rather than writing an autobiography Helen Mirren was commissioned by Alan Samson at Orion Books to write about her life in a series of chapters based on pictures from her extensive personal collection of photography and memorabilia. Edited by Chris Worwood, with whom she worked on the Award-winning HBO series Elizabeth, the book covers every aspect of her life from her aristocratic Russian heritage to her days with Peter Hall's RSC company to her Academy Award for The Queen.