INSTANT EXPERT
Brush up on your Helen Mirren facts ahead of Fast 8.
I don’t mind if I don’t have any lines as long as I get to wear a crown,” Dame Helen Mirren once deadpanned. She’s certainly had no shortage of opportunities. On screen, she’s humanised Queen Charlotte in The
Madness Of King George (1994), played the title role in TV’s Elizabeth I (2005) plus Elizabeth II in The Queen (2006), and revisited Liz II on stage for The
Audience (2013). As if by royal decree, numerous awards duly followed.
I’m a would-be rebel,” Mirren once said. A convention-busting interest in “eroticism as art” manifested itself from her breakout in Michael Powell’s Age Of Consent to the none-more-lurid Caligula and Peter Greenaway’s sumptuous The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. Yet she lambasted critics’ seeming inability to see beyond sex-symbol clichés (Google “Helen Mirren Parkinson”) and recognise her performances’ emotional truths.
Mirren has made some game swerves into genre lanes, from voicing Monsters University’s Dean Hardscrabble to playing a hitwoman in the Red films. We’ll soon see her fulfilling her “great ambition to be in a Fast & Furious movie”. Mirren will sear tarmac in this month’s F&F8.
Praised by Arthur Miller for her “open expression of large emotions”, Mirren’s hearty smarts rang true from the moment her “very intelligent” Patricia seduced Malcolm McDowell in O Lucky Man!. Later, she developed an under-realised role in The Long Good Friday, anchored
Gosford Park’s emotions and, as big Alf’s wife Alma Reville in Hitchcock, reminded us of the brains behind the Psycho titan’s operations.
Mirren made telly history with a take-no-crap performance as DCI Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect. Other TV highs followed. She bagged a Golden Globe for Kevin Bacon’s Losing
Chase (1996) and played a washed-up singer beautifully in 1997’s murdermystery Painted Lady. The latter’s writer Allan Cubitt (whose The Fall owes Prime Suspect big time) summed up her pitch: “She is fantastically unconcerned about her image.” KH