A less-than-masterful first impression for Mirren
Helen Mirren sat down with Alfred Hitchcock and ...
That sentence is enough to make any movie lover lean forward in fascination. However, as Mirren recounts that longago meeting, it was an underwhelming experience, a minor footnote in her career at the time, a random crossing of the paths of a legendary filmmaker and a young stage actress.
“I was just starting out, and he was doing Frenzy (1972) in London,’’ Mirren recalls, as she settles onto a couch for an interview at a Manhattan hotel. “I don’t really remember much about the meeting.
“In my ignorance, my youthful ignorance and arrogance, to me he was old-school and I wasn’t interested,’’ she admits. “If he’d been Antonioni, Bertolucci or one of the other great European directors, I would have been very, very excited. I was stupid. I didn’t realize that Hitchcock was the masterful director that he was.
“I remember him sitting behind a desk. He was just huge at the time. He had this head on top of this massive body, and he was sitting there looking at me very disapprovingly. I was looking very disapprovingly back. So I don’t think it was a match made in heaven.’’
Mirren went on to do well without Hitchcock’s help. At 67 she counts among her honours an Academy Award as Best Actress for The Queen (2006), four Emmy Awards and four BAFTA Awards, as well as an impressive array of credits that spans from O Lucky Man! (1973), The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989) and the television series Prime Suspect (1991-2006) to Gosford Park (2001) and Red (2010). In 2003 Mirren was invested as a dame commander of the Order of the British Empire.
Now, in the best Hollywood style, Mirren and Hitchcock have come together again. Mirren plays the director’s wife, Alma Reville, in Hitchcock, a new film that depicts his struggle to make and release the classic Psycho (1960). It also examines his complex relationship with Alma, who served as her husband’s film editor, sounding board and best friend. Anthony Hopkins stars as the legendary Master of Suspense.
Resplendent in a black dress and eager to talk, Mirren offers her suggestion for a better title for the film: The Hitchcocks. That’s because the film, which opens in Edmonton on Friday, is as much about the lesserknown Alma as it is about Alfred.
“Without that I wouldn’t really have wanted to be in the film,’’ says Mirren, who is married to the American director Taylor Hackford, with whom she lives in London and Los Angeles. “It was essential. Also I was interested in discovering the truth of that, the importance of Alma in that creative partnership. It was a great discovery for me. I wasn’t aware of it before I read the script and started to do research.
“Hitchcock’s daughter, Patricia, wrote a book that was really my main source of research,’’ Mirren says, referring to Alma Hitchcock: The Woman Behind the Man. “The book is wonderful, but it’s the fact that she chose to write the book about her mother, not her father, that fascinated me. Patricia was cognizant of the fact that Alma wasn’t getting the recognition that she felt her mother deserved. So this is coming from the horse’s mouth.
“I must say that I came to really like Alma. I liked her sense of relaxation, her ease with the role she had within the family, within the creative process. She wasn’t angsty about it or secretly ambitious or jealous or angry. I think she loved Hitchcock and found him very funny, and she seemed to be laughing in every photo I could find of her. They laughed a lot, and I think a sense of humour — humour and movies — held them together as much as anything else.’’
Many moviegoers will be attracted to Hitchcock for its subject matter, while others will appreciate the stellar cast, which includes Jessica Biel as Vera Miles, James D’Arcy as Anthony Perkins and Scarlett Johansson as Janet Leigh. The main attraction, however, is the first pairing of two of Britain’s finest living actors, Hopkins and Mirren.
“Tony and I had never worked together,’’ Mirren says, “but we’ve lived in parallel universes. We had very similar backgrounds in theatre, in film, of coming to work in America. So, once we got together for this, it was extraordinarily easy. It was as if we’d worked together all our lives in some rep company somewhere.
Beyond Hitchcock, Mirren has completed work on two upcoming projects. She costars in an upcoming, as-yetuntitled HBO drama about disgraced music producer Phil Spector (Al Pacino), in which she plays lawyer Linda Kenney Bader, who defended Spector in his first murder trial. Also wrapped is Red 2, a sequel to the comic-book-based 2010 hit that reunites her with John Malkovich, Mary-Louise Parker and Bruce Willis.
Mention the word “longevity’’ to Mirren, and her eyes light up. She admits she’s as amazed as anyone to still be in such demand.
“It’s good fortune. My profession is so random and everything is so ... unexpected. You can never take credit, really, for it. You have to give some credit to good fortune, but I do try to be easy to work with. I have observed people who get caught up in their own neuroses or ego or their own vortex of creativity, because creative people can be quite complex. They can spiral off and it becomes unbearable to work with them, really.”