WHY LIFE REALLY DOES GET BETTER
Helen Mirren shares how age and experience have helped her overcome the self-doubt she felt at the beginning of her career.
Helen Mirren opens up about how age and experience have helped her to overcome self-doubt
'Ithought I was an idiot; I still do,’ says Dame Helen Mirren. ‘I thought I was ugly; I still do.’ With these words, the 71-year-old actress shoots down her image as the poster girl for salty, sexy later-life swagger. Despite a career that spans Shakespeare and The Queen, Prime Suspect and the latest instalment of The Fast and the Furious, which has brought her countless awards and the honour of damehood, Mirren claims to be no more confident now than she was in her teens.
Performing was her way of managing her anxieties: ‘People think actors are exhibitionists, and some are, but many cannot deal with the fear of being who they are, and the process of acting allows them to get up and speak.’ Indeed, she has said that many actors are terrified at red-carpet appearances. ‘You go up and say hi and you touch them and you feel them trembling. It’s an incredibly nerve-racking experience. But you are there and you have to deal with it.’
Today, Mirren is backing an initiative to help troubled young people ‘find the tools to deal with whatever insecurities they have’, as she did.
Among her other roles, Mirren has been a UK ambassador for L’Oréal Paris since 2014, pushing its famous message ‘Because you’re worth it’. The cosmetics giant has teamed up with the Prince’s Trust to help young people ‘turn selfdoubt into self-worth’. It will open All Worth It spaces at the charity’s centres in south London and Salford, Manchester, offering confidence training as well as help online. The idea is to help under-thirties to get into work or training and overcome mental-health or substance-abuse issues, among other problems. L’Oréal Paris is marking the partnership by changing its slogan to ‘We’re all worth it’.
Mirren was ‘surprised and quite delighted’ to hear about the tie-up with the Prince’s Trust, because she has been a supporter of the charity and a fan of its president, Prince Charles, for years. (The fact that she has played his mother on screen and on stage, in The Audience, has, she says, never been discussed. However, at an awards ceremony, Prince William nodded to her from the stage and said, ‘Granny’s here.’)
Mirren, who has no children, regards herself as more of a friend than a stepmother to the now-adult sons of her husband, film director Taylor Hackford, whom she has been with for 33 years.
Has the plight of the young been close to her heart, though? ‘Ironically, the older you get the more you realise how important the young are,’ she says. ‘But it has always pained me, the thought of a frightened, depressed, miserable or nervous young person.’
She supports Say, the Stuttering Association for the Young in the US, and admires the It Gets Better Project, which is aimed at gay youth around the world. ‘Because life does get better,’ she says. ‘Lots of things get better: understanding yourself, understanding other
‘I hate the word sexy. But be free, be liberated, be what you want to be.’
people, and just generally not giving as much of a f*** any more.’
She concedes that she and Hackford might not still be together had they met earlier in life, ‘when we were both on very targeted professional journeys’. Their relationship has succeeded partly because each gives the other the freedom to do what they really need or want to do professionally.
Mirren says she was ‘incredibly unconfident as a young person’ growing up in Westcliff-on-Sea, the daughter of a Russian cab driver turned civil servant and an East End butcher’s daughter. At the launch of the Prince’s Trust initiative she said that she didn’t smile until her mid-thirties: ‘I thought I looked stupid when I smiled. Then I learnt the power of the smile. Funnily enough, when you smile, even if you don’t feel like smiling, you immediately feel better.’
She may have been signed with an agent at 20, after playing Cleopatra with the National Youth Theatre, but that was 1965, when men hardly listened to women. (That didn’t change much in the seventies or eighties – she presumes she was and still is paid less than her male co-stars.) She told GQ in 2008 that she endured unwanted sexual encounters in her twenties because she didn’t have the courage to tell ‘men who wouldn’t take no for an answer to f*** off’.
That she was blonde and curvy also notoriously prompted English broadcaster Michael Parkinson to ask if her ‘assets’ got in the way of her being considered a serious actress, in turn prompting a frosty response. ‘I suppose I came across as confident [then], but I remember leaving that interview and crying on the way home, thinking, “Oh my God, I blew it; I didn’t know how to handle it; what an idiot I am.” I didn’t realise until many, many years later that I did actually have some sort of confidence. And I think often young people do underestimate themselves to a great extent.’
She would still rather have been young in the 1960s than now, though. ‘My sister [a retired teacher] and I were talking about it the other day. I said, “Can you believe how we grew up, Kate, and the difference with the world now?” She said, “Yes, we had our school uniform and one dress, and I am so grateful for that.” It must be so difficult for kids nowadays with the attention on what you are wearing and how you look and what bag you are carrying, whatever nonsense it is. Children are always cruel. They are all fighting for their spot, which creates a lot of cruelty.’
Despite her protestations, I would say that Mirren is pretty self-assured these days. She is delightfully frank in interviews, telling one journalist that she ‘loved’ taking cocaine in her twenties, and another that she packs only underwear when she travels and buys clothes at charity shops at her destination.
The first time I interviewed her, she was supposed to promote an awful film (National Treasure: Book of Secrets) in which she played Nicolas Cage’s mother, but ended up saying: ‘Oh God, Nick, I can see your f***ing eyes glazing over at this bloody actress boring on.’ This time, she mischievously refuses to confirm or deny whether she will be doing her own handbrake turns and wheel spins in the eighth Fast and
Furious. ‘I’ve always fancied myself as a bit of a stunt driver,’ she says. ‘They make out it’s unbelievably difficult, driving, but that’s not true.’
She has always worked by alternating stage and prestige screen roles with ‘popcorn movies’, and walked away from her two biggest roles, Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect and the Queen, before they could define her. ‘Well, of course, my career is pretty amazing,’ she concedes. ‘I am lucky in my profession that I am still working. So I can’t complain about that. But this doesn’t mean my nasty, niggling little nub of ambition has shut up yet: “Why aren’t you doing this or that? Why didn’t you do that better? Oh, you blew it there.” That sort of drive is there, and I wish it wasn’t, as I’m kind of fed up with it.’
She is ambivalent about being a role model for older women. ‘Um. Hmm. I don’t mind it; let’s put it that way,’ she says. However, her forthcoming campaign for L’Oréal Paris’s new décolletage range reportedly encourages the over-fifties to unbutton and show a bit more skin. Is it important to remain sexy? ‘Not sexy, no,’ she says with a faint aura of queenly disgust. ‘I hate the word sexy. But be free, be liberated, be what you want to be. It’s to do with liberation, not sexiness: that’s probably in the past.’ And even if you are being yourself, she cautions, you might, to other eyes, ‘look completely mad’.
Getting glammed up, though, is a great booster of confidence. ‘I am very girly in that way. I have my happiest moments sitting in front of my makeup mirror, putting on my mascara. I love that process; I’m not embarrassed about that at all. I know it is kind of a dream, the whole thing, but I think we need dreams in our world. I get very cross with people, often men in the financial world, who say I live in the world of imagination. Well, what the f*** is the world of finance if not imagination? Why does the stock market go up or down because someone is elected president? The whole thing is kind of a fantasy.’
I don’t know about you, but Dame Helen Mirren sounds pretty confident to me.