Nudity No 'Big Deal' For Dame Helen
This segment was originally broadcast on Jan. 7, 2007. It was updated on Aug. 3, 2007.
Dame Helen Mirren, the 62-year-old British actress, won acclaim this year for her three memorable performances as Queen Elizabeth I, as a troubled police detective and as Elizabeth II in the movie "The Queen," an account of the crisis that enveloped Buckingham Palace in the week following the death of Princess Diana.
For that role she won both an Academy Award and Golden Globe for best actress.
Dame Helen can fairly be described as a great trouper in the grand tradition – classical theatre, questionable movies that required nudity as much as they did talent, and memorable television roles. But as correspondent Morley Safer reports, her specialty is playing formidable women, women of great power, women with great flaws.
She plays women like Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, the reigning queen of England. And with equal ease, Mirren became Elizabeth I and dominated every scene, much the way this Elizabeth dominated her realm.
These women may appear to be made of tempered steel but Mirren disagrees. Speaking about Elizabeth I, Mirren comments, "Vulnerable, stupid, silly …. Made such ridiculous mistakes."
"And a tempestuous person, a very vulnerable personality," Mirren points out. "Bursting into tears one minute, throwing her shoes the next minute."
Elizabeth I, says Mirren, was a very volatile personality. "Not steel at all. And I think that that's what makes any character interesting, is their vulnerability, their fear, their insecurities."
But the most flawed of Mirren's strong characters is Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison of the cult television series "Prime Suspect." She plays a tenacious single cop with a long, impeccable list of bad habits, including heavy drinking and sleeping with the wrong people.
Mirren plays her with a total absence of vanity, especially in the very last installment of "Prime Suspect."
"You look like crap. You're hung over. You know you've done something naughty the night before but you can't even remember who you did it with," Safer remarks. "You have a shot of vodka for breakfast."
"Well, to get through the day," Mirren says.
"And then things start going badly," Safer continues.
"And then they go downhill from there, that's right," she agrees.
Tennison is known for getting even with men, especially the chauvinist cops who blocked her promotion. In the series, she uses words as if they were bullets.
"Was the opportunity to play a role in which a woman treats men like dirt…," Safer asks.
"Not all men," Mirren objects. "No, she doesn't treat all men like dirt. You know Morley that's, now I think that's a bit of a sexist remark."
"If a male is messing up, she's unafraid of saying so," Mirren explains.
Mirren's Tennison never uses what used to be called feminine wiles. There's no sweetness, no light. "As a woman, you're used to getting your own way or asking for things with a smile, you know. 'Would you mind?' 'Is it ok?' You know, 'Morley, could you?' You know," Mirren says.
Famous People And The Stars Who Bring Them To Life
Photo: Helen Mirren
"Of course," Safer agrees.
"Instead of saying, 'Morley, go get that for me,'" Mirren says.
But how much Jane Tennison is in Helen Mirren? One critic said, 'She's all about sex and domination. Part submissive, vulnerable and yet invincible. Pretty good.'"
"Very accurate," Mirren agrees, laughing. "Now that is kind of true. I think there is great truth in that."
Those are the roles that are written for her but Mirren says she chooses them.
"Well, I don't choose them, they come my way and I don't say no," she adds.
"You make them into submissive, vulnerable, yet invincible, correct?" Safer asks.
"Maybe. I mean that's not conscious, Morley, I mean I'm not conscious like that. One isn't. You just do, you do what seems right at that second," she explains.
When Mirren started in theater, her goal was to be a great classical actor. Originally, Mirren says, she was inspired by Shakespeare.
Asked if she was inspired by the language of his writing, Mirren tells Safer, "The language, but really more the stories, the characters, the imaginative world that these people lived in that were just so much more exciting than the dull, little world that I lived in Southend on Sea, Essex, the armpit of England."
Mirren grew up in Leigh-on-Sea, a suburb of Southend, a working class holiday town. She was born Ilyena Lydia Mironoff. Her father Vasily was the son of Russian aristocrats stranded in England after the Russian revolution. Her mother Kathleen was a cockney girl daughter of a butcher, who grew up when "class" really mattered.
The Mironoffs or Mirrens, who were considered slightly Bohemian, did not exactly fit in to any class.
"I never felt quite that I absolutely belonged," Mirren says. "And I had yearnings for another world. I never wanted to get married and live in Leigh-on-Sea for the rest of my life which is what a lot of my school colleagues did."
School was St. Bernard's, a convent school run by Bernardine nuns. It was strict – no boys, no short skirts, no mention of sex. But it was at the school that Mirren got her first shot at acting, in the annual Nativity pageant, where she played Eve.
"I was Eve. It was sort of a leopard skin outfit, it was great. 'Oh Adam, what shall we do, whither shall we go?' I remember my lines as I was being thrown out of the Garden of Eden downstairs in the hall…. A lot of this," she recalls.
It was in the Southend amusement park that Mirren honed her acting skills working as a barker, enticing holiday makers to take a shot at the games of chance.
"And you sort of shout out something like, 'Excuse me sir, excuse me, did you park in at the gate? Sir, sir, sir. Did you park in at the gate?' And they go, 'What? What?" You're talking rubbish.' And so they come over and then they say 'I'm sorry what did you say?' You say, 'Did you park in at that gate? Anyway it doesn't matter, I've got a lovely attraction here look, great dart stall, prizes you can win,'" Mirren remembers.
Asked if she learned something that she still uses today, Mirren says, "I did. Oh! A very high skill in bodushitsu."
Bodushitsu, she explains laughing, is the Japanese for b---s---.
"No, you know I brought away with me a love, an appreciation of the vulgar and the carnival," she says. "It's rough and working class and real."
"You use some of that in a couple of roles, correct?" Safer asks.
Famous People And The Stars Who Bring Them To Life
Photo: Helen Mirren
"Yes, absolutely. Yes, it's always in me a bit, this world," she replies.
Mirren's earthiness won her rave reviews. After a sizzling portrayal of Cleopatra while still in her teens, she was invited to join the Royal Shakespeare Company. She dazzled audiences with her talent and blatant sexuality in modern and classical roles.
And then there were the early films, like Caligula.
Most of them were turkeys, most notable for Mirren taking her clothes off.
"Indeed," she agrees. "We call it 'Getting your kit off' in England."
"Yes. I'm famous for getting my kit off in England, yes," Mirren says.
The roles have earned her such titles as "the sex queen of Stratford" and "the thinking man's crumpet."
Asked if any of this got to her in any way, Mirren says, "It did used to get to me. I just kind of ignored it. Which I'm still doing to this day, Morley. It's still hanging around."
And she's still doing it – "getting her kit off." As recently as age 58, Mirren took it all off again for "Calendar Girls."
"Oh, it gets better as you get older, Morley, you should try it," she tells Safer.
"Well, no…," he replies.
"Yes, I think we should do this interview, both of us in the nude. You'd love it. Go on," she says.
"What the hell?" Safer replies, laughing.
"Well, you know I mean, I don't see the big deal, you know I don't get, it," Mirren says.
Despite her commercial and professional success, Mirren says her twenties were the worst years of her life. She was plagued by a lack of self confidence and panic attacks.
"I wasn't happy then, I wasn't happy. I was frightened," she says. "I mean just frightened that nothing would work out."
Mirren finally sought help from a psychiatrist. "And he was Scottish. And so he said, 'Well, I think what your problem is, Helen, I think you'll find … I said, 'I'm sorry, I didn't quite hear what you said.' 'Well, Helen I think you'll find your problem is … ' And before the fourth time, I thought 'This is ridiculous, I'm here with this psychiatrist, he's telling me the answer to all my problems, and I can't understand what he's saying,'" she remembers.
So she went to a palm reader who told her her future – which she carefully wrote down and instantly forgot.
But she remembered one thing the palmist told her. "He said 'When you're in your 50s you will get to be very, very famous,'" she tells Safer.
And she is very famous. In her fifties, she won two Academy Award nominations and eight Emmy nominations, including two wins. She's on the red carpet again this year, getting attention and Oscar buzz for her star turn in "The Queen."
Also in her fifties, she married director Taylor Hackford, her husband of nine years. They live in London, in a house by the Thames, when they're not at their house in Los Angeles, or New York, or the south of France.
Asked if Mirren regrets never having had children, she says, "No. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. I am so happy that I didn't have children. Well, you know because I've had freedom."
She had the freedom to become the person she dreamed about when she was barking at the suckers on the pier in Southend-on-Sea.
"Did you ever believe when you were a kid here that you would be who you are today?" Safer asks.
"No," she replies. "'Course I hoped and I did this I mean embarrassing thing when I think about it now, I used to sit on a bench on the seafront, you know, my hair like this, imagining that a film producer would be driving by and would screech to a halt and get out and say 'You're the girl I've been looking for.' Really, really pathetic. I had my sort of silly dreams and of course, the reality is so much more interesting the way in which life takes you – the hard work is so much more fun actually."
"Fun, I guess when you look back through the misty light of memory," Safer remarks.
"Look Morley, it's the sun setting on my career," Mirren says.
"Our career!" he replies.
"I was going to say! Exactly! As we walk hand in hand on into the sunset!" Mirren tells Safer.
Produced By Ruth Streeter