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
I was part of the first generation of girls and women to be educated and go to grammar school even if we didn't have much money. Then that generation went, 'OK, great', and went into medicine or the police, and hit this wall of discrimination from older men who hadn't caught up.
It's outrageous. It's ridiculous. And 'twas ever thus. We all watched James Bond as he got more and more geriatric, and his girlfriends got younger and younger. It's so annoying.
It was not my destiny, I kept thinking it would be, waiting for it to happen, but it never did, and I didn't care what people thought ... It was only boring old men who would ask me. And whenever they went, 'What? No children? Well, you'd better get on with it, old girl,' I'd say 'No! F*** off!'
I'm a would-be rebel. The good girl who'd like to be a bad one.
Girls go out together to see a chick flick or something. I loathe, I hate, chick flicks.
Women have got to stop being polite. If I ever had children, which I don't, the first thing I'd teach a girl of mine is the words 'f - off.'
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
The most important thing is to bring people with Parkinson's into our world and for the public to have a real understanding of it, as they're beginning to have with autism.
I think we all have a dream of what it would be like not to work and grow heirloom tomatoes, and I do have that dream. It would be lovely. I do love gardening and all of that, but I do love my work.