Dame Helen Mirren
Harry Borden looks back on two shoots with the highlyregarded and multi-award-winning actor
The kind of portraits I’ve taken on celebrity shoots have been largely determined by the sort of job I’ve been doing. Even within the world of editorial shoots, I might either be given a free hand to do whatever I like, or the brief might be quite specific. For that reason, some jobs are more enjoyable – and the results more satisfying – than others. In an ideal situation my aim is to get a definitive, interesting, ambiguous picture that has a chance of not being ephemeral, but sometimes the limits of a particular commission make that difficult to achieve.
I’ve photographed Helen Mirren twice and both times were quite different. The first time was in 1999, when I was asked to shoot portraits of her for a feature in the Sunday
Times Culture magazine. At that time, Mirren was 54 and had already had a long and successful career in films, TV, and the theatre. In the 1990s she was perhaps most famous for playing DCI Jane Tennison in the longrunning TV drama Prime Suspect.
I met her at the stage door of the Cambridge Arts Theatre, where she was starring in a play. The commissioning editor had given me the freedom to choose how I wanted to photograph her. I was using my preferred camera-lens combination at that time, a Hasselblad 500CM with a standard 80mm lens, but
I also took along a Polaroid 195 camera which I intended to use if time allowed.
She was very self-assured but pleasant to be with and very amenable to my suggestions for places to shoot. She said she had once dated a photographer, liked being photographed and found it quite a creative experience. I started with some shots of her in the theatre itself, lit by a ringflash and using some wooden panels, used to improve the theatre’s acoustics, as a background. Those shots worked quite well, but I wanted to look around outside the theatre for other environments.
We ended up wandering around Cambridge and eventually into the gardens of King’s College, where I photographed her using natural light. It was a warm October day and we had fun trying out different locations. She was engaging and playful to photograph.
As I’ve previously said when talking about celebrity shoots,
I sometimes like to make someone famous look rather anonymous, so you’re almost not sure it’s them. The white hooded raincoat she wore helped me to do that, and in some shots I asked her to use a ‘curtain’ of hair to cover one side of her face.
Towards the end of the session, I managed to take a few shots with the Polaroid 195, which shot 3¼x4¼in instant film. It produced beautiful, sharp images, more large-format than medium-format in quality, but the downside was you needed to carry around a bucket of sodium thiosulphate (fixer) solution to put the film in.
Restaurant shoot
The second shoot took place in 2001. It was for a specific feature, ‘My Favourite Table’ in the Observer, in which well-known people would talk about a restaurant they really liked. Mirren chose Corelli’s in Battersea, London, which was near where she lived at that time. It was a small and functional Italian restaurant on an unglamorous road, which wasn’t what I had expected. It was the kind of place only locals would know. However, after eating there when the shoot ended, I could see why she liked it – the food was simple, unpretentious and very good.
The restaurant was open for business, so we arranged the shoot for the period before lunch, before it got busy. This time, Mirren turned up in a tight-fitting white dress and her hair was shorter. Her appearance was absolutely perfect for the venue, which was like an Italian café in the 1950s and was decorated with black & white pictures of film stars.
The situation was ready-made for photography, but Mirren didn’t have much time and I only shot two or three rolls of film, again using my Hasselblad 500CM. She was beautifully lit by the copious amounts of natural light coming in through the restaurant’s big glass windows.
I like the shot of her with the tiled walls and framed photos in the background, but for me it’s more of a convivial snap than something really creative. As soon as you start photographing people in restaurants for a food magazine, the shoot becomes about food, however much you try to subvert it by playing down the food element.
My favourite shot of her from the two shoots is the black & white portrait taken with the Polaroid 195, with a background of dark foliage. She’s wearing her normal clothes and I like the whole feel of the image. She may look more glamorous in the restaurant shot, but the one taken in the garden is much truer to the person she is when not playing a role.