Newcastle charlady who made Helen Mirren think of her mother
Helen Mirren felt strangely at home when filming her latest movie The Duke, with Jim Broadbent, as their characters reminded her of her parents.
The Oscar winners play Kempton Bunton, a well-meaning fantasist involved in the theft of Goya’s painting of the Duke of Wellington from the national Portrait Gallery in 1961, and his charlady wife Dorothy. Mirren said that in many ways, Dorothy — who made a living cleaning houses in newcastle — brought back memories of Kathleen, her own mother, because ‘my father was an idealist, rather like Kempton’.
She told me that her dad, Vasily Mironov, was a socialist who, like Bunton, went on marches and signed petitions. There were other similarities, too. ‘He was a cabbie, like Kempton. Then he went to work for the Ministry of Transport.’
However, Kempton wasn’t able to provide for his family — he was always losing jobs. And as a result, Dorothy was the main breadwinner, through her charlady jobs. ‘My mother, like Dorothy, understood the practicalities of life with my father,’ Mirren told me, when i visited her on location in late 2019 (though set in newcastle, The Duke was actually filmed in leeds).
Mirren said her parents — and the Buntons — belonged to ‘the noble generation’: families who got through the Depression, only to be plunged into a war and its aftermath. When she lost her mother several years ago, she mourned her — but also grieved for ‘the loss of that generation who knew what it was like during the Blitz’.
She said she loved playing Dorothy because the character had ‘newcastle backbone’. ‘She had to be that way, to put food on the table. i liked her lack of sentimentality,’ she told me. Mirren got down on her hands and knees to scrub doorsteps during filming. ‘i rather liked it — i like cleaning,’ she said, smiling.
The film’s director, the late roger Michell, told me he wanted to capture ‘a slice of englishness’ and ‘a sense of the great British eccentric in Kempton — and the common sense qualities of Dorothy’.
There’s a lot about Dorothy that i recognise, too, in part from my upbringing with a white foster mother, though this was on the wrong side of richmond, Surrey, not up north.
i have a great fondness for The Duke, partly because of my admiration for Michell, who died last September; and partly for the sheer pleasure of watching two celebrated thespians doing what they do, so effortlessly.
■ The Duke opens in cinemas next Friday, February 25.