Mirren oes back to her Russian roots
HeLen Mirren is to portray Catherine the Great in a lavish television drama — adding to the pantheon of royal women the multiaward-winning star has already played during her stellar career.
Mirren confirmed to me that she has joined forces with director Philip Martin (who directed her exit performance as DCi Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect: The Final act) to make a four-part series for hBo on the russian czarina, who ruled over a vast empire after her idiot, drunkard husband Peter iii was assassinated in a coup d’etat just six months after taking the throne.
‘We’re starting to put pieces in place,’ Mirren told me when we spoke at the Golden Globe awards, where she had been nominated for her performance in the heartbreaking film The Leisure Seekers, alongside Donald Sutherland.
apart from enjoying a good professional relationship with the acting dame, Martin also directed seven episodes of the celebrated netflix series The Crown (he’s one of its several executive producers). he has a feel for marrying intimate drama with spectacular opulence.
The hope is that much of the Catherine the Great footage will be filmed in the lavish imperial palaces in St Petersburg and nearby Tsarskoe Selo, which were built by Peter iii’s forebears.
Catherine, who was actually a German princess from a minor noble family, was a lover of literature and great art. She filled the imperial collections with fine works — many from Britain (she had the painter Joshua reynolds knock her out some treasured canvases).
Filming will likely start later this year or early in 2019; and casting will be extensive. The empress of russia had a dozen lovers; plus there are all manner of historical figures involved in her story.
as i mentioned, this isn’t Mirren’s first stint as a monarch. She famously portrayed elizabeth ii in Stephen Frears’s The Queen, and again on stage in The audience, for Stephen Daldry and Peter Morgan; as well as elizabeth i in a Channel 4 television series.
and then there’s her russian ancestry: her grandfather was a russian aristocrat and before she became helen Mirren, she was ilyena Lydia Mironoff.