Mirren: ‘There’s been an endless litany of mistakes in my life’
There’s not a major award in theatre, TV and film that Helen Mirren hasn’t won — Oscar, Bafta, Golden Globe, Emmy, Tony, Olivier, she’s got the lot. She’s also one of a select band of British actresses to bear the title of Dame.
Today, aged 71, she has Hollywood at her heels. She is the go-to actress for intelligent, challenging roles such as Elizabeth II in The Queen (for which she won her Oscar) and Alma Reville in Hitchcock, but is also happy to tote a machine gun in Red and Red 2, and has been lined up to appear in Fast and Furious 8 next year. Meanwhile, the West End and Broadway can only hold their breath and wait for her return (she last conquered both in The Audience in 2013 and 2015).
But if — and I’m sure she’d hate the mere idea of this — she is now regarded as an elder-stateswoman of her profession, such an exalted position was never a foregone conclusion.Mirrenhasspentherlifeflying by her own lights, never afraid to be outspoken, never one to shy away from conflict.
“I’ve made many, many mistakes in my life, you know,” she says. “I turned down projects I should have said yes to, done projects I should have said no to, had relationships with people that I shouldn’t have hadarelationshipwith,gotdrunkat times that I shouldn’t have got drunk.” She laughs. “There’s been an endless litany of mistakes and missteps but somehow I’ve stumbled to being at the right place at the right time.”
Her early passion was for the theatre, and from the age of 13, when she playedCalibaninaproductionof The Tempest at St Bernard’s Convent School in Westcliff-on-Sea, she knew she wanted to be an actress. In defiance of her parents’ wishes that she become a teacher, she joined the National Youth Theatre and at the age of 18 was playing Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra attheOldVic.
Back then she had no plans to try to try to make it in film: “I didn’t want to be rich and famous,” she says. “I wanted to be thought of as a great actress and the only way I could see to that was through theatre. I wanted to be recognised as a great theatre actress.”
‘The Sex Queen of Stratford’
Over her long and varied career, taking in work with the RSC, Peter Brook, the Royal Court, the National Theatre, on Broadway and in the West End, she has unquestionably become one of our great theatre actresses. But at the outset, in the late Sixties, she made headlines less for the quality of her performances and more for her frequent state of undress on stage and screen. One newspaper dubbed her “the Sex Queen of Stratford”.
She appeared as a call girl in a film called Hussy and as a sexually voracious high-priestess in Tinto Brass’s film Caligula. “Everyone was naked in that,” she later said. “I was like showing up for a nudist camp every day. You felt embarrassed if you had your clothes on in that movie.”
Nearly three decades on when she was asked why she had stripped bare during a 1998 performance of Antony and Cleopatra at the National Theatre, she replied tartly, “It’s not necessary, but it sells the product.”
As a young woman, she says, she put her work before her private life. “I very consciously chose my work over my relationships right up to the time that I met Taylor (Hackford, her husband),” she says. “I was 38 when I met him, pretty late in life.”
Love beyond one’s 20s
Mirren contends there’s a major benefit to discovering love beyond one’s 20s. “The great thing about finding a partnership later on in life is that you recognise it as such,” she said. “You recognise the partnership level of this relationship as much as the love and the lust and all the rest of it.”
As we talk, her husband Taylor Hackford, whom she married in 1997 but has been with since 1986, is also in New York promoting The Comedian, the film he has directed which stars Robert De Niro.
“It’s serendipity,” she says. “I was shooting Collateral Beauty in New York at the same time he was shooting The Comedian and it was the first time in our professional lives together — which has been a long time — that we’ve actually been in the same city at the same time but working on different projects. So it was great to do what most people get to do which is come home and say, ‘Hello darling, how was your day?’ That was so rare for us that it was a great experience. And now we’re on this journey together as well.”
Her latest role is playing the grim reaper in the film Collateral Beauty, turning up at the home of Will Smith’s advertising executive Howard after he writes angry and accusatory letters to Death, Time and Love following the loss of his sixyear-old daughter.
To get an idea of how she should look for her role, Mirren searched the internet but didn’t like what she found. “It was scary and spooky — all these horrible black skulls, the scythe and the black and I just thought, ‘That’s not where I want to go at all,’ and then I saw one little image of a bluebird and I clicked on it. I seemed to remember in the Aztec or South American Indian culture the bluebird is a sign of death and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s perfect because it’s kind of beautiful.’ At first I was just going to wear a little bluebird pin but then we took it further and I’m dressed all in blue.”
Does she believe there can be somethingredemptiveaboutdeath? “Very often it’s only really after peoplediethatweunderstandthebeauty of their lives,” she says.
I didn’t want to be rich and famous. I wanted to be thought of as a great actress and the only way I could see to that was through theatre.” Helen Mirren, actress
Still described as a sex symbol
What about her own life, I ask. Has turning 70 focused her mind on not wasting the time she has left? “I haven’t learnt the trick of making the most of every moment,” she says. “I still waste time which is terrible at my age but I am much more conscious of it. It manifests itself when my husband and I decide to plant a tree and it dawns on me that we can’t plant a two-year-old tree anymore because we’ll never see it grown.”
Still, Mirren doesn’t look like she’s anywhere near having one foot in the grave and it’s easy to see why, at the age of 71, she’s still being described as a sex symbol. “I think it’s probably going to follow me to my grave,” she sighs, although clearly not that unhappy about the idea.
There are few acting challenges to which Mirren has failed to rise, but it turns out there’s one thing she can’t do. When she was cast in Collateral Beauty she pleaded with the filmmakers not to insists she speak with an American accent.
“I have such a terrible American accent,” she says. “I’m so bad it’s ridiculous. My husband’s American and I’ve lived in America yet it’s so difficult for me. I can do German, I can do South African, I can do Australian, I can do French, I can do Italian, kind of. But American is really hard for me.”