Currently filming the second series of MobLand, in which she plays an Irish gangland matriarch alongside Pierce Brosnan, Helen Mirren says it’s helped her to swerve retirement
Her stellar 60 year career has seen her perform alongside titans of stage and screen, from Sir Laurence Olivier to Dame Judi Dench. Yet Dame Helen Mirren – whose portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II in the Olivier and Tony Award-winning hit The Audience is currently screening in cinemas – confesses she still gets starstruck. She says: “There have been people that I have been in awe of and very starstruck by, like Harrison … Nick Cage. Those big movie stars I always find very intimidating. I get very tongue tied. I talk too much and it’s out of embarrassment, really.”
Currently filming the second series of MobLand, in which she plays Irish gangland matriarch, Maeve Harrigan, alongside Pierce Brosnan, she says it’s helped her to swerve retirement. Now 80, she says: “You ‘get retired’ in a way in this business. That’s why, in a sense you want to play characters with agency and importance. That is why I love doing MobLand, as my character is so dreadful and so full of agency.”
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The Paramount+ drama follows the lives of a London Irish crime dynasty, including Maeve. Helen chirps: “My appalling character has just got out of jail. They never explain how I got out. I am just out. But it is great working with Pierce Brosnan again, who is a great actor and person. He is such a true professional and loves doing it, which is not always the way.”
Dame Helen, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II in the 2006 movie The Queen, is thrilled to still be landing leading roles. She explains how women were often neglected before her 2003 movie Calendar Girls, which saw fellow dames Julie Walters, Celia Imrie and Penelope Wilton play middle aged Yorkshire women making a nude calendar for cancer awareness. The movie, which became a West End play, was a turning point for women and how they were seen in the industry, according to Dame Helen.
She says: “We did have fun, because back then, it was so rare to even have one other woman in a film with you. If you look at the cast of movies back then it would be like 20 men and one woman. It would enrage me for all the wonderful actresses I had worked with over the years who just could not find employment. It was profoundly unfair and the guys did not seem to realise. It’s much better now, like with MobLand – there are great women’s roles. But Calendar Girls was the first time I’d done something with only women. Every time one of us had to do a topless shot, I instituted a get together where we opened three bottles of champagne to toast the girl who had just done her scene.”
Awarded a Damehood in the 2003 Queen’s Birthday Honours, it was something she could never have imagined, growing up. She says: “I always had ambitions to be an actress as a schoolgirl. We did not have a lot of money, my family. We did not go to the theatre or the cinema, but my mum took me to see Hamlet when I was 13 and that was the nail in the coffin.
“I was so overwhelmed by the poetry, the story. It must have been a very bad production, but it did not matter. I went home and my parents had one of those huge volumes of Shakespeare and I went straight to it and found these incredible characters. Acting did not seem a possibility when you are growing up in Southend-on-Sea in a little back street. It is an impossible dream. There was no way.”
Inspired by her English teacher, Dame Helen successfully auditioned for the National Youth Theatre in London and was soon hooked. She says: “My teacher Mrs Welding revealed the beauty of poetry to me. She knew about the youth theatre and told me to audition for it. I did not tell my parents. I snuck up to London to audition and they took me on. It was a summer holiday thing. I was 17, just before going to college.
“I played Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and when I looked at my costume it had the name Diana Rigg written in it. A little too tight for me, but it was the most exciting thing. The great thing about the youth theatre back then was all the national newspapers used to come – and agents. I got great reviews and I had agents ringing me up. I immediately entered the profession.”
A host of theatrical roles followed throughout the 1970s. She laughs: “At that time, the British film industry was awful. It was all like Carry On films and window cleaners and girls taking their clothes off. Like Confessions of a Window Cleaner and Hammer Horror. At that time all the good work, good writing and good directors were working on television.”
Thankfully, for Dame Helen, the industry changed and in 1980 she starred alongside Bob Hoskins in the gritty gangster movie The Long Good Friday. Her role as Hoskins’ tough talking mistress caught the eye of TV executives, who in 1990 cast her in her breakthrough role as DCI Jane Tennison in the ITV detective drama Prime Suspect, which ran for seven series.
She says: “When I did Prime Suspect that taught me everything about working on camera. At that time, they were very unsure whether a woman could lead a drama. You had the American police show Cagney and Lacey, but to have a single woman leading a show was unheard of. They were very wary it would not be accepted.”
Thankfully, it was a storming success and became her springboard into serious film work, with a repertoire ranging from Gosford Park (2001) to Woman in Gold (2015) and action hits like Red (2010) the Fast & Furious franchise – starring with Vin Diesel and Jason Statham in 2017.
Of her role as Magdalene ‘Queenie’ Shaw, she says: “I wanted to be in those movies because a lot of people go and see them. Also, I really wanted to drive a fabulous car really fast. I saw Vin at a party and said ‘Well, can I be in Fast & Furious?’ He has this fantastic voice and says ‘Yeah, sure baby’. He squeezed a role for me, but I was not in a car at all. I was in the back of a bloody ambulance with Jason Statham. Eventually I got to drive a car. The male actors love me on set. I know they think I am more grand than I actually am.”
To date, Dame Helen has starred in four of the 11 Fast & Furious movies. And she says they could have been named after her, following her fast and furious arrival in Chiswick, west London, on July 26, 1945. She laughs: “I was born at the Queen Charlotte hospital. It was the fastest birth on record. I was two weeks late, but the birth was 20 minutes from beginning to end. Late…but it is so interesting as I am still like that. I am late and then I get it done really quickly. I procrastinate and then I have to do it really fast. And nothing has changed!”
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