Helen Mirren: I Love Queen Elizabeth

Already this year, Dame Helen Mirren has won an Emmy for playing Queen Elizabeth I on HBO. Now, she's generating Oscar buzz for her challenging roll as Queen Elizabeth II, the current British monarch, in "The Queen."

But Mirren doesn't want to venture down that speculative road.

"This was a dangerous route to go down in many ways," she told The Early Show co-anchor Julie Chen. "The work is what is important and all the other stuff is fantastic."

"The Queen" is set in 1997 immediately after Princess Di was killed in the car crash. It examines the queen's sense of her role as monarch and her response to the peoples' grief.

"It was more difficult thinking about it than doing it," Mirren said. "It was intimidating when I was first offered the role when it came my way. I was terrified, actually. The responsibility of looking like her and sounding like her …"

Once Mirren is in costume, the resemblance to the queen is uncanny. She said transforming herself was a slow process, completed with wigs, makeup and other accessories. She said she truly began to look like the queen when she began acting like the queen.

Mirren initially said she saw the queen the way most others did: as a grumpy woman who could smile once in a while. But her research taught Mirren new things about the queen.

"I learned about her honesty, her decency," she said. "I learned about her true inner strength of character and I grew to love her."

Mirren would love to know what Queen Elizabeth thinks of her performance and thinks that she will end up seeing the film.

"I can't see how she can resist because the film has a huge amount of attention," she said.