So Helen, what IS the truth about you and cosmetic surgery?
She looks sensational at 70. Here she reveals exactly how
Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim NORA EPHRON
Somewhat incongruously, I find myself in the middle of the Cannes Film Festival, sitting before a bonafide screen legend learning what can be achieved with a DIY home haircut and a toothbrush. ‘I whacked this on the other night,’ declares Dame helen mirren, brandishing a box of dye. ‘a quick all over job. I maybe colour it twice a year. I use a shade that will blend — L’oreal Paris Light Beige Blonde — and allow that to grow out. my sister and I still give each other streaks with an old toothbrush. I don’t have my hair cut in a salon — maybe once, twice a year, but I cut it myself a lot.’
Looking at mirren’s perfectly precise coiffure I am tempted to ask for a chop. we also discuss how one doesn’t need cosmetics for an 8am dog walk, the joy of over-the-top make-up, and how, at 70, she’s
about to shave her head for a new film. As hollywood grooming advice goes, it is not your standard fare.
But, then, Dame helen is no ordinary superstar. Seeing her among so many pouting, selfie-obsessed starlets is like seeing a swan among geese: all gliding, oldschool glamour.
Despite a later red-carpet tumble, one cannot imagine her renouncing heels to go barefoot a la Julia Roberts. She looks incredible for any age, let alone someone in their eighth decade.
When we meet, she is sporting midnight blue eyeshadow to complement the gown she’s about to slip into, that ice blonde hair slicked modishly off her face. She looks beautiful. Not the crazed, unlined, airbrushed-into-an- egg type beauty favoured by hollywood studios, but luminous, chiselled-cheekboned, glowing. And yes, with wrinkles.
MUChhas been made of the fact that, on taking up her contract as the spokesperson for L’Oreal (and becoming one of the oldest faces of a major cosmetics brand in the process) helen accepted only on condition they didn’t photoshop her campaign images. Is that really true?
‘In all honesty. I don’t think I said: “Absolutely no retouching,”’ she tells me. ‘I said: “Minimal — the absolute least we can do.” Because sometimes a hair is sticking up or there’s a shadow.
‘But I did not want that overly smooth face that’s hardly recognisable. I’ve been retouched in movie posters and I look at it and go: “Well, it’s all very well, I look kind of great, but, it’s not me at all. It’s some construct up there.” ’
But what about real-life retouching? In 2014 she told The Times she was considering cosmetic surgery ‘very, very soon’. If she has had work it’s amazingly subtle.
her jawline looks incredible, but she doesn’t look as though she’s had any filler, with none of the giveaway chipmunk cheeks you see on other celebrities.
But when I remark that her attitude to cosmetic surgery appears to be, ‘Brilliant, if you want it, but I don’t want it yet’, she laughs: ‘I would just say: “Brilliant if you want it, full stop!” ’
Is this a not-so-subtle hint that she has had something done? Anne Robinson certainly seemed to think so in an interview with the Mail last Saturday, when she joked that if helen hadn’t had ‘some help’, she needed new specs. I probe further.
As an actress, I say, I imagine it’s quite hard to go down the Botox and fillers route? ‘ No, not hard, it’s very easy — for some!’ she guffaws. Is it something she’s dabbled in? She says, still laughing, that she’s not going to tell me.
She is, however, happy to talk make-up. She loves her slap with a passion, forever sampling new products and raving convincingly about the L’Oreal Paris Rosy Re-Fortifying Day Cream she’s here to promote.
‘I think we get stuck with a look, particularly when we get older. We forget that you can experiment. It’s not the end of the world — you can always wipe it off again.’
ThATsaid, she will go bare-faced: ‘ The irony is that — the older you get — the less you care. I think: “God, when I was young, and probably had much better skin, I wouldn’t dream of going out without mascara.” Now I really don’t mind.
‘I mean, if you’re taking your dog for a walk at eight in the morning it doesn’t really matter.’
She is obsessed with blending, and has recently started paying more attention to her eyebrows, inspired, she says, not by Cara Delevingne, but her Majesty the Queen.
‘I don’t think the Queen has ever touched them. She’s got quite present eyebrows. So when I was making myself up as the Queen I thought: “Oooh, that’s actually quite an interesting look.” ’
even without her Oscar-winning performance, there is something undeniably queenly about Dame helen, born Ilenya Mironov, granddaughter of a Russian nobleman. Director Trevor Nunn called her his ‘Russian princess’.
Perhaps it’s the posture. Sheonce persuaded an entire American chat show audience to sit up properly after they commended her figure, instructing them that a straight spine was all.
Which brings us to that famous physique. helen has endured a lifetime of objectification; not least a monstrous, Seventies interview with Michael Parkinson, in which he alluded to ‘her equipment’, informing her she was ‘sluttishly erotic’. has she felt leered at?
‘ It was leery,’ she concedes about the attention she had from men when she started her career, ‘ especially when I was very young. It was super-leery and very male orientated.
‘Now it’s shifted to a different sort of take in the light of the freedom of women to be proud of their bodies, no matter what their shape; proud of this wonderful instrument that carries our minds around. So it’s shifted, and I absolutely applaud that.’
Now it seems the admiration for helen’s looks often comes as much from envious women. When she was caught on an Italian beach aged 63, what woman didn’t go: ‘ Damn it, I wish I looked as brilliant in a bikini’?
helen laughs at the memory. ‘honestly, I looked at that picture and I thought: “God, I wish I looked like that!” Because I don’t really look like that.
‘I happened to be holding my stomach in because my husband was taking my photo at exactly that moment. I really lucked out there. Don’t get me wrong, from time to time, I go to the gym. I get into it, but mostly I do it for my mind rather than my body because it’s very good for your mental state being sort of fittish.
‘But I never seem to keep it up for longer than two months. It's the same with diets — constantly falling off and getting back on again.’
Legions of us would be no less keen to lay claim to her hair. She finds this mystifying: ‘I’m not a hair person actually. I’ve played around with colour forever; but very randomly and accidentally'.
Yet her youthfully insouciant style is the envy of women every — where, her decision to have a pink rinse in 2013 emulated by legions.
The key, as with make-up, appears to be to keep things evolving: ‘I think everyone should just grow their colour right out once in a while, cut their hair short, and re-look at the whole thing because people get frightened.
‘They’ve done the same thing for the last 20 years and they’re terrified of shaking it up. I shake it up all the time. I have to for work which is a very good lesson.
‘In fact, I’m about to have my hair cut this short [she mines an inch]. I’m doing a film with Donald Sutherland — a sort of older person’s road movie. I’ve never done that before so I’m kind of
I’ve been retouched in movie posters and I look great but it’s not me. I don’t want a smooth face that’s hardly recognisable
looking forward to it. It’ll be exciting.’ Her character has cancer, hence the brutally close crop. There are very few Hollywood stars who would take such a relaxed attitude in an industry in which looks are all. And it’s pure Mirren.
She is emphatically not someone who, the moment they see a speck of grey, obliterates it.
‘You have to grow out of that. It’s the men, incidentally, more than the women. You see these men with their ridiculous dye jobs. It gets red at the roots. It looks weird. You can tell when they’ve just had it done, men of a certain age who just refuse to go grey.’ Given that we’re in France, surrounded by Americans, and she shares a house in Italy with her film director husband Taylor Hackford, how does she feel British women shape up compared with the rest of the world?
‘The French are not so much more glamorous than us as more put together,’ she muses.
‘American women are very good at grooming. In Italy, women will buy one expensive outfit for summer, another outfit for winter, and then build their wardrobe around classic pieces.
‘Whereas we go into H&M and go: “Oooh, I love that green skirt with the lace underneath — that’s really cool. I know it’s too young for me, but I love it. I’m gonna have it.” ‘I love the eccentricity of the British people. I don’t want us to lose our personality.’
Personality, of course, tends to become only more apparent with age, and Helen, a pioneer throughout her career, is now at the forefront of a generation of women confronting the beauty industry’s traditional age phobia.
L’Oreal’s campaigns include Diane Keaton (70), Jane Fonda (78), and Susan Sarrandon (69). Octogenarian Joan Collins boasts her own make-up range, while Nars claims 70-year-old Charlotte Rampling as its face.
Does she feel like a poster girl for ageing? A trailblazer for ‘the older woman’, ghastly as that phrase is?
‘It’s a terrible phrase. I do notice that when people do articles in magazines about make-up and clothes, and they say: “Clothes for the older woman”, they only ever go up to 60. They never go to 70, or 80, or 90. You don’t drop off! Excuse me. Hello! Er, you know, carry on, please.
‘It used to drive me crazy when I was in my 40s looking at photographs advertising a cream on the face of a girl who was 16. It’s like: “I’m sorry that means nothing to me.” It’s changed because of feminism, and because of women having fought to get to a position where they’re allowed to be who they are, be proud of it, and take control of it.’ As someone who’s lost a little of her own glimmer following parental loss, I ask whether she feels there are different stages of ageing? ‘Well, of course there are. That’s what being a human being is. It’s travelling through your life and hitting these extraordinary milestones. ‘For me, a big milestone was losing my mother at 51. I lost my father much earlier when I was just 35, so it was realising that now, in a sense, I was an orphan. I wasn’t anybody’s child. I was a truly grown-up person. I think what you don’t understand as a young person is that someone of 40 is also growing up, and someone of 50 is growing up, and someone of 60 is growing up, and so on.’ But back to those milestones. Having children is often thought to be one of the major moments in a woman’s life. As someone without kids, does she ever miss having them around? ‘I have step-grandchildren; I have stepchildren. I have nieces and nephews; I have great nieces and nephews. My family’s the most important thing to me. ‘But I don’t personally miss having children. I really don’t. I have loved my life, that’s the thing. I’ve absolutely loved the amazing sort of freedom that I’ve had.’
Andit shows, not least in her beautiful, animated, septuagenarian face. Cannes, which she admits to finding ‘intimidating’, has been making her nostalgic.
‘Funnily enough, I’ve been thinking about when I first came to Cannes in my 20s because I was so different then. I came with nothing. I was doing experimental theatre in Paris and arrived as a sort of actor-y tramp-type person.
‘Warner Brothers were horrified. “You can’t go to Cannes looking like that!” They had to go out and buy me some clothes.’
This is not a problem she faces today. After my audience she sweeps off to the Cinema Against AIDS AMFAR Gala, one of the most starry events at Cannes, looking every inch the Hollywood Grande Dame she is.