Mirren knew feminism’s real secret: Have the last laugh

WHO would be a man these days? We women never forget a slight. The fact you bought us a thong that was a size too big two Christmases ago. The fact you ignored us at a party in 1983. Or, as in Michael Parkinson’s case, the fact you dared to question, in 1975 no less, whether or not Helen Mirren was a serious Shakespearean actress, given her ‘equipment’.

Helen Mirren retaliated: ‘Serious actresses can’t have big bosoms, is that what you mean?’

This brief encounter on his chat show has resurfaced regularly over the years as an example of the kind of crass sexism that leaves women permanently diminished. Last Sunday Parky finally retaliated in an interview in Event magazine, saying, ‘There is no need to apologise, not at all… Am I a sexist? No, I’m Yorkshire.’

Now, I don’t have much ‘equipment’ – I had a breast reduction at the age of 29 – and so have never experienced the shock of men alluding to them in conversation, but I do live in North Yorkshire.

When I first moved here, a Yorkshireman arrived to erect my Sky dish. ‘You’ll do a’ight here,’ he said, upon learning I was single. I brightened, until he added: ‘If you’ve nout got wool and are female, you’ll do a’ight.’

By her own admission, Helen Mirren started her career with a ‘toxic mix of a great physical shyness and a palpable physical presence’, but soon realised that her ‘brand of sensuality is a very uncommon property, and not to use it would be an appalling waste’. In other words, she used her body as a tool, a springboard.

And why not? She’s an actress, not trying to uncover the mysteries of black holes. How she looks is pertinent.

After doing her dues teaching and in rep, she joined the RSC, which prompted an early interview in a Sunday supplement to bear the headline ‘Stratford’s very own sex queen’. The epithet haunted her for 20 years, and the accompanying article exposes the sexism of the day: the male writer called Mirren ‘a nicely rounded girl’, and described her mostly female stage door fans as having ‘no trace of the butch fervour which so often marks the Ladies Paddock in the gallery’.

Mirren, on the other hand, revealed herself in that interview to be a prototype feminist: ‘What I can’t stand is when a woman comes into a room with just one thought in her tiny mind: what effect she’s having on the men.’

She has never needed the furies of the sisterhood to rush to her defence. Not then, not ever. She had Parky’s measure from the start, so why should he apologise?

I’ve met Mirren twice. Once, at the Vanity Fair party after she won an Oscar for The Queen, when I made her pose with me for a selfie: she was gracious and smiley. The second time, also in LA, was when I interviewed her to promote a film.

SHE had clearly had no work done to her face and kept rubbing her eyes, leaning her face in her hands, something I’d never seen a Hollywood actress do before: when you touch or rub your face, wrinkles form. We talked about a recent pap shot of her in a red bikini: ‘I’m beyond bikiniwearing age, I don’t really look that good normally, it was just a flattering picture. I look like a woman in her 60s.’ Tellingly, on the day we met, there was a small earthquake. I’d sat at my desk in my hotel room, typing, despite the fact my chair was trying to traverse the room.

Mirren, too, it turned out, had been unperturbed, and continued posing for some photo or other. That’s stoicism. That an illjudged remark from a middleaged chat-show host would have derailed her, I very much doubt.

Parky, like most men, and despite the recent headlines of historic abuse by 1970s TV stars, is harmless; he was simply making great TV.

Aged 29, I should have taken a leaf out of Helen Mirren’s book. Use what you have. Your body is not that important. Your looks will go. Try to be happy. Enjoy a long and happy marriage. If you can’t have children, then leave behind a body of work. And if a man disrespects you, make him feel small, as Mirren did so deftly with Parky.

Success is the best revenge. Not endless inquiries, witchhunts, demands for compensation. The best a victim can do – and Helen Mirren was a victim: of her time, of male directors and writers and chat-show hosts and journalists – is to have the last laugh.

Brush off the likes of Michael Parkinson, as if he is so much dandruff, or so much snow. We get a lot of that up here in Yorkshire too.