Helen Mirren
Helen Mirren
Dame Helen Lydia Mirren, DBE, is an English actor. Mirren began her acting career with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1967, and is one of the few performers who have achieved the Triple Crown of Acting, having won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 2007, after two previous nominations, for her performance as Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen. In 2015 she won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play, after two previous nominations, for her performance...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionMovie Actress
Date of Birth26 July 1945
CityLondon, England
Ill-informed intuition is fantastic - it's what great art is. So really old painters or writers or actors are brilliant, because they've finally reached the point when they can let go of al technique.
I love photography and I love the art of photography. So when I'm working with high-level art photographers, I give them artistic freedom because I want that for myself when it's my turn to do my work and I never try and control it or say I'll only do this or I want it like that.
The timing of comedy is so difficult. You've got to leave room for a laugh, you don't want to kill the laugh, but on film, you can't just suddenly stop for a laugh and then carry on. So, I think it's a real art form, comedy on film.
I love photography, and I love the art of photography.
I think it's always hard for people to get their head around the fact that populist, commercial films can also actually be great works of art.
I don't mind being sexy, but on my terms. To this day, I love sexuality. I love the art of sexuality. I love Lady Gaga and the performance of sexuality. The mysterious, the artistic and the slightly perverse. I'm interested in all that.
It'll be the Internet and piracy that will kill film. There's a philosophy that the Internet should be free, but the reality is that piracy will destroy the film industry and film as an art form because it's expensive to make a movie. Maybe you'll have funky little independent movies, and it'll go back and then start up again some other way.
I always feel when you work with an artist and whenever I work with a really good photographer, I try to give him or her their own artistic freedom because that's the way you get the best work or at least the most interesting work.
Her Elizabeth is so genius. It's just fabulous and, in its comedic, excessive way, there is a lot of accuracy there.
I would feel very bad if she didn't like the way I played her. I certainly don't want to stick a knife in her - especially now that I'm a dame, and I might have that taken away from me.
I didn't want to be knocked over by a car and have my obituary talk only about Prime Suspect.
One thing I found hard to get scripted was the size of her ego. Her ego was so huge. She was about being the queen, and everybody had better treat her as the queen. I am not like that.
Obviously, we're putting 20 years into four hours, so things have to become truncated.
When you do Shakespeare they think you must be intelligent because they think you understand what you're saying