Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
GREAT DAME
Ruthless, courageous and with a very racy love life – Helen Mirren tells what she learnt about Russian empress Catherine the Great as she plays her in a stunning new mini-series
Helen Mirren on how she accidentally talked her way into playing history’s coolest empress
With her Russian roots and impeccable pedigree playing our two Queen Elizabeths, there could be no actress better suited to portraying Russian empress Catherine the Great – who ruled Russia for most of the last half of the 18th century – than Dame Helen Mirren. It’s a role she inhabits effortlessly in Sky’s sumptuous new mini-series, sweeping majestically through the Russian court with her head held high, tossing jokes and threats to all and gossipy asides to her best friend Countess Praskovya Bruce (Gina McKee) as if to the manner born. But it’s a role she had to be persuaded to take on.
‘Honestly, I really didn’t want to do it,’ she confesses when we meet in Los Angeles. ‘I was being interviewed a couple of years ago and at the end of the interview the journalist asked me what role I wanted to play next. Now, whenever I’m asked that question, my mind just goes blank – I can’t think of anything. But I had to say something, and sort of out of the blue I thought of Catherine and what an interesting character in history she was, so I just said, “Well, I wouldn’t mind playing Catherine the Great.” I never imagined in a million years that anybody would be interested enough to want to finance anything like that.
‘But I was wrong because the producer I was working with at the time, David M Thompson, heard I’d said that and basically raised the finance. And I have to say that at that point my heart absolutely sank, because the thought of having to gear myself up to play this woman, to investigate her world and do all the hard work involved in entering into it, felt like a sword of Damocles hanging over my head. All I wanted to do was sit at home and watch television. But luckily for me it worked out in the end – and here we are!’
Catherine, born posh but poor to a fading aristocratic family in Prussia, was only 15 when she was sent to Russia to be married off to her second cousin, Peter of Holstein- Gottorp, heir to the Tsardom. She was 32 when Peter acceded to the Russian throne, but only six months into his less-than-popular reign she organised a coup d’etat that forced him from power, shortly after which he died in mysterious – and suspicious – circumstances.
For the next 30 years, until her death in 1796, she ruled with astounding success, taking Russia from a struggling country to one of the great nations of Europe, founding cities, supporting medical advances such as the then-revolutionary theory of innoculation, patronising the arts and encouraging education for women.
‘She was cool!’ says Helen, her blue eyes shining with enthusiasm for her subject. ‘I think there are certain women – just like there are certain men – who, by a combination of their inborn character and the circumstances of the time, create this huge person. Catherine was one of them. She came to Russia from a small German town to marry the tsar-in-waiting. She was 15, she knew nothing, she spoke no Russian, and she was thrown into this exotic, complex, ancient world where she at times experienced incredible duress.
‘ But she negotiated it all brilliantly and then had the courage to take the throne. She was, I think, one of the most remarkable women in history because she took on that incredibly complicated, huge, violent, difficult country and, my goodness, she ruled it and kept absolute control of it. She was extraordinary.’
Of course, it helps that Helen herself has a history with Russia. Her grandfather, Pyotr Vasilievich Mironoff, was a veteran of the Imperial Russian Army and former diplomat who was driven out of the country during the Revolution and ended up as a cab driver in Southend. ‘But that side of my history was repressed when I was small because my father, Vasily, accepted that world was gone. So he changed his name to Basil Mirren and just wanted us to assimilate and be British.’
The first time she visited Russia herself was in the late 1960s, when she was already an established actress. ‘I was part of one of the early cultural exchanges Russia had with the West. First the Bolshoi Ballet came to London, and then the Royal Shakespeare Company, where I was working, went to Moscow and Leningrad. This was at a time when Russia was very deeply into Bolshevik Communism and it was quite a thing to go there. To find myself standing on the terrain that had actually given birth to my grandfather was a very emotional moment for me.’
Fast-forward half a century and she says the Russian government could not have been more accommodating in letting the crew for the new series shoot in a variety of historic locations. ‘We shot in Catherine’s palace, which had also been the palace of Catherine I, the wife of Peter The Great. All those palaces were destroyed in the Second World War, but they have been restored and I have to say they have done an unbelievable job, because they’re now beautifully authentic.
‘So I was standing in Catherine’s palace, and most of it has been restored except for a tiny little piece of wooden floor from the 18th century, which even has a burn mark where they say Nazi soldiers had a bonfire in the middle of the room. I was wearing my costume and wandering through the place on my own, looking out of the window that Catherine would have looked out of, seeing the buildings she saw, and that was an amazing moment. I felt so incredibly privileged to have that experience because most people don’t.’
Despite her initial reservations, once she began to find out more about Catherine her fascination quickly grew. ‘I read three books about her and one about her and her lover Potemkin [played in the series by First Man’s Jason Clarke]. I also read her letters, and I got to love her so much, because you really get a sense of her character, her naturalness, her intelligence, her questioning, her pragmatism, her political acumen. It’s all there in her correspondence.
‘There were great similarities, I felt, between her and Elizabeth I, because like her she was extraordi
‘We shot in her palace – an amazing moment’
narily intelligent and hard-working. She was also quite ruthless at times – if she hadn’t been she would never have survived. But she knew when to be ruthless and when not to be. She knew when to be forgiving and generous.’
She adds that what a lesser person would have seen as the disadvantage of being female, Catherine turned to her advantage. ‘I think that many successful women are like this. Because they’re conscious of the fact that nothing is going to be given to them on a plate, they end up working that much harder. Catherine’s work ethic was incredible. She’d get up at 5am and write for five hours. She also had that ability women have that if someone was pushing her, she wouldn’t do the masculine thing of pushing back against it. She would more likely give in to the push and go around the corner. She’d say, “OK, fine, we can’t do it this way, let’s do it that way instead.” She had an ability to negotiate with whatever was thrown at her, and make it work for her.’
Inevitably, a strong woman in a man’s world will attract some less-than-desirable attention, and Helen acknowledges that Catherine, who was endowed with a healthy sex drive, was no exception. ‘It’s the way powerful women are often punished throughout history. The whole thing of her sexuality – the intimation that she was some sort of mad sexual creature – was absolutely not true. Yes she liked men, but she was actually a serial monogamist, as are so many of us – me included!’
She had a reported 22 lovers during the course of her life, to whom she was famously generous after the affairs had run their course. ‘She was always very nice to them,’ says Helen. ‘She gave them palaces – she even gave one guy a country when she wanted to get rid of him. Basically, she said, “Here’s Poland, now go off and be king over there!” She loved sex and she loved men, she wanted to be flattered. But it was a different moral climate then. Today, if a head of state anywhere had a series of lovers we’d look down on that. But during my research, I came to realise that even today we’re still climbing out of a sort of Puritanism that came in during Victorian times, but which the 18th century just didn’t have.’
The lover who took most of her heart was Pr ince Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin – s t at esma n, military leader and bon vivant – with whom she was so besotted that the two were even rumoured to have been secretly married. ‘He was unbelievably wild, fun-loving and drunken and Jason had a lot of fun with him. He really got the point that Potemkin’s a big character to have to embrace and he just went at it as Potemkin himself would have – like a bull in a china shop. Jason’s the most wonderful guy and it was a great thing to see. But Catherine wasn’t going to marry Potemkin – at least not in public. Like Elizabeth I, she knew that if she married anyone she would have to relinquish her power, and she wasn’t going to do that!’
‘She was a serial monogamist – like me’