My life’s been a litany of mistakes

But, reveals Dame Helen Mirren, she wouldn’t want it any other way

NOW that she has reached the Biblical lifespan of threescore years and ten, Dame Helen Mirren is reflecting on the passage of time — her time. If she had the chance to live it all again, she wouldn’t change a thing, she declares.

‘That’s not to say I haven’t made many, many mistakes along the way,’ she admits. ‘It’s been an endless litany of mistakes and mis-steps.

‘I’ve turned down acting jobs I should have said “yes” to, accepted ones I should have said “No” to, had relationships with people I shouldn’t have had a relationship with and got drunk at times when I should have remained sober.

‘everything in life is interdependent, and if I’d gone off in a different direction it would have affected everything else. yet despite all the wrong turns, somehow I’ve been led stumbling to the point where I am right now, which is the place I most want to be in my life.

‘OK, I have as much self-doubt as anyone else has, and I don’t have any secret sort of wonderful understanding of the universe or anything.

‘I don’t believe in God, though I appreciate people who do, so I don’t have any great spiritual answer to life. I just try to be honest about who I am and where I fit in the world.

‘It’s really just a question of carrying on, isn’t it?’

We meet in Beverly Hills, hunting ground of her latest movie character, powerful Fifties gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, in Trumbo, in which she wears a series of ever more outrageous hats and wields a viper’s touch on the typewriter.

She is chic in a grey-on-grey tailored Armani suit, her hair in a distinguished silvery bob, her eyes alight with interest and circled with lines of 70 years of laughter. I tell her that — in the best possible way — she does, indeed, look every day of her age.

‘I’m getting old!’ she agrees briskly. ‘And that’s fine. I mean, I try to look as nice as I can and, of course, I’d love to look 20 years younger, but if I tried I wouldn’t succeed because you never do.

‘It’s all about accepting who you are and acknowledging that this is what happens — either you die young or you get old. And I don’t want to die young! I’m far too curious about life and what human beings are going to be doing in the next 20 years.

‘If I’d died at 27, the age that Kurt Cobain [of rock band Nirvana] died in 1994, I’d never have even known there was an internet! Incredible things are happening all the time and I can’t wait to see what comes next.’

Of course, it helps that her private life is spectacularly happy. After a roller-coaster romantic life during her 30s, which included, among others, a long-running affair with a then obscure young actor called Liam Neeson, she finally fell in love for good when she was 40, with the American film director Taylor Hackford.

THEY met when he directed her in White Nights, a 1985 drama set in the world of ballet. It was hardly love at first sight. ‘I had no idea that we were going to fall in love. He didn’t tick any of my boxes at all.

‘He was a director and he was American — not that I have anything against that, I hasten to add — but America is quite foreign and a long way away from england.

‘For a while I just had this feeling of: “How is this ever going to work?” It was his wisdom and patience that made me appreciate his wonderful qualities over a period of time.

‘I’ve been unbelievably fortunate in my marriage and in my family, which are the things that count the most in this world.’ And she adds, very firmly, ‘It was never my ambition to be a Hollywood star.’

For someone who didn’t aspire to get to the top in Tinseltown, she’s done an impressive job in getting there.

A solid fixture on every top producer’s wish list for more than 20 years, she has been nominated for Oscars — The Madness Of King George in 1994, Gosford Park in 2001 and The Last Station in 2009 — and won one, for The Queen in 2006.

Along the way, she’s played elizabeth I and elizabeth II, Mrs Tolstoy in The Last Station, a female Prospera in The Tempest and a trained assassin in Red and Red 2.

Not bad for a girl born in Hammersmith, West London, and brought up in Leigh-on-Sea, essex, who never thought that she’d make it in the acting world at all.

‘I never even imagined that being an actress would be possible,’ says Helen, the granddaughter of a colonel in the Tsar’s Russian Imperial Army, who became a London cabbie after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.

Her father, Vasily Mironov, who anglicised his name to Basil Mirren, also worked as a taxi driver before becoming a driving test examiner. Her mother Kitty’s grandfather had been Queen Victoria’s butcher.

‘I came from a family background where that [acting] world just seemed like a fortress, something you couldn’t get into.

‘We weren’t at all wealthy — we didn’t have a TV, a washing machine or a car — but one very important thing that my parents always taught me was: “you must be financially independent.”

‘They wanted me to become a teacher, not an actress! So I did train as a teacher and I have the highest respect for people in that profession.’

She grew up a dreamer. When she was a child, she would lie in her bedroom, look up at the stars outside her window and imagine that the letter ‘A’ that they seemed to form meant that she was destined to live in America. ‘I wasn’t thinking about Hollywood because I wanted to be a theatre actress. I didn’t even go to the cinema very often because we couldn’t afford it. ‘Though I do remember one day when I was 16 or 17 and was working as a waitress in my aunt’s bed and breakfast hotel in Brighton, I didn’t have anything to do in the afternoons so I wandered into this really stinky little fleapit of an art cinema they had in town.

‘I really only went in to get out of the rain more than anything.

‘There on the screen was Monica Vitti in Antonioni’s L’Avventura and it was just…you know those moments when you’re young and you see something for the first time and you’re just breathless with excitement? Well, that was how this was for me.’

She got her break through the National youth Theatre and then the Royal Shakespeare Company.

‘I have been very lucky in my career, and I don’t disregard my good luck by any means, but I have also worked hard at it — there’s never been a year when I haven’t worked.

‘I take great pride and great pleasure in knowing that these days I am, indeed, financially secure, and that everything I have, I have earned.’

MIRREN went on to have a pretty good career in all three branches of her chosen profession. She has remained a legend of the theatre for a full four decades, most recently portraying the Queen in The Audience in the West end and on Broadway.

In Prime Suspect on TV, her Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison has turned a borderline alcoholic curmudgeon into a role model for a generation of hardworking women.

And now on the big screen comes Trumbo, a lavishly produced movie about the notorious blacklist of supposed Communist supporters that dominated Hollywood in the Fifties, and the enormous influence behind the scenes that was wielded by Hedda Hopper. ‘She was an