‘Liberate us from sexy, please!’

And other lessons from Dame Helen Mirren

HELEN Mirren, who will be 70 on July 26, is asked by an interviewer—in what seems an attempt to flatter—for her reaction to the observation that a lot of women (please note that the interviewer, herself a woman, didn’t say men) still think of her as sexy. After all, Helen Mirren was once called, in her earlier years in theater, “Sex Queen of Stratford,” for her willingness to strip off on stage.

Attractive

Now a dame and better known for her portrayal of queens and other strong women, she tells her interviewer in a crisp British accent, with nary a trace of her Russian heritage, “I don’t think sexy is important at all. What does it mean, really? Attractive is the word I’m looking for. Attractive I can understand, in the sense of personality and charm. Free us, liberate us from all that. Liberate us from sexy, please!”

Catching the interview on BBC, an interview occasioned by her latest movie, “Woman in Gold,” I couldn’t agree with her more: Right on, Dame Helen! She could very well have been speaking for all of us women septuagenarians. Whether we like it or not, the time has come for public (please note I didn’t say private) sexy to end, and it’s best we stop all futile and sometimes disastrous attempts to hang on.

If we’ve done right by our lives, there should, if anything, be personality and charm to fall back on to remain attractive enough for the rest of our lives. Surely we can at least manage to retain our place among interesting and pleasant company; better to for- get the purely physical endowments associated with sexy—those wrinkled cleavages are surely best shielded from the cruel light of day and retired from the viewing public altogether. After all, as much as some of us ourselves beg off from sexy, so too may the rest of the world wish to be spared the physical evidence of the ravages of time on old skin and muscles. And at last, in well-justified triumph, those who were never blessed with them may now gloat.

Dame Helen’s new movie is about a Jewish Viennese lady, Maria Altman, whose family is dispossessed of their paintings by the Nazis during the war. “It isn’t only about stolen art. . . It is also about stolen lives and stolen memories,” she says, adding she herself values memories almost as much as life.

When the interviewer raises the point of yet another, possibly by now tiresome, holocaust movie, she gives off a haughty laugh, “Of course, it’s about the Holocaust; it’s always about the Holocaust . . . because it happened.”

And instead of explaining herself further, she recounts a visit she made to the American south in the days of the civil-rights movement. Mimicking the southern character to perfection, she tells of a lady who herself thought that people should not dwell on such ugliness in the past, that it was best to move on. In complete disagreement, Dame Helen believes we should be made to remember the past, precisely because the ugliness is happening still.

We don’t have to look far our- selves. It’s happening even now to our own minorities—“dispossession of one’s material goods and being forcefully ejected from one’s home because someone else won.”

Rich package

“Woman in Gold” is also a love story. Dame Helen plays an older woman in a relationship with a younger man, portrayed by Ryan Reynolds. It is a role, she says, “you don’t often get.” In fact, she calls it “a rich package for an actress.” She goes on to lament how very few important roles there are for women, when in life it is not so. She blames the media, which she observes to be lopsidedly focused on men’s interests. (In another account, separate from the interview, that I have run into, she is said to wear her advocacy on her left hand, in a tattoo of something like a star she had done when she visited an Indian reservation in Minnesota. She says it means “equal but opposite.”)

Asked about any plans for her 70th, she says, “I’m not a big birthday celebrator myself. If anyone deserved to have a party it should be our mothers, who did all the work.” Forthwith she faces her audience, theatrically imploring it, “Everyone who has a birthday coming up, give your mom a party instead!” A sweet thought indeed, from one with no children of her own, though a stepmom to the two children of her husband of nearly 20 years, Taylor Hackford, the director.

On Mother’s Day, wherever mommay be (mine is in heaven), send her loving thoughts. My own day will be particularly special: For the first time in 10 years I have all my four children with me.

To all of us moms and stepmoms: Happy Mother’s Day!