Queen Elizabeth II might be the dowdiest character Helen Mirren has ever had to play, she tells Donald Clarke, but it hasn't stopped people going on and on about her sexuality
When, fate and good-health permitting, Helen Mirren is shuffled before the media to promote some prestige project in 2015, at least one magazine cover will undoubtedly see fit to tell us she is "Still Sexy at 70". For the past 25 years or so, interviews with Dame Helen have allowed male journalists to show what good sports they are by making undignified "phwoar" noises at somebody old enough to remember the Beatles. I sense a double standard. Malcolm McDowell is never held up as an example of how one can still be delicious at 60. Journalists rarely ogle Ian McKellen.
"Though I'm sure Ian would love it if they did," Mirren cackles. "It's not really to do with being a sex symbol. That is not the word. I have had to wrestle with this all my life. I try to deconstruct it and discover what it is all about. I think it's not really to do with sexuality in terms of bonking. It's to do with sexuality in terms of maleness and femaleness and how those things come together." Pardon? She clearly has, indeed, thought very deeply about this and we will return to the subject later.
To be fair, newspapers have, during the present round of interviews, had a difficult time portraying Mirren as a mature sex kitten. This is not, you understand, because she has suddenly transformed into a warty crone. Dressed in an ivory top, her hair silvery blonde, Dame Helen, talking in a surprisingly hushed voice, looks sharp, elegant and poised. The problem is that most current interviews will be forced to carry a photograph of her wearing bad glasses, old-lady hair and Stone-Age cosmetics. Mirren has, bravely, taken on the role of Queen Elizabeth II for Stephen Frears's canny examination of the rift between the Palace and Downing Street in the week following the death of Princess Diana. Written by Stephen Morgan, who earlier dramatised the rise of Tony Blair in Frears's The Deal, The Queen shows the monarch reluctantly acknowledging new realities and indulging the mass hysteria that gripped Britain in those strange days.
So how did Mirren, whose performance deservedly won her the best actress award at the recent Venice Film Festival, react when the part was first offered to her? Did she not think she was a little to, erm, glamorous to play the somewhat homely Windsor? "Oh, I let go of glamour ages ago," she laughs. "Although I have to say when I did my first costume fitting - all those sensible shoes and those boxy skirts and Barbour jackets - I actually became quite upset. I had just played Elizabeth I on television with the jewels and the brocade and diamonds - all that fabulous stuff. I actually cried when I looked at what I had to wear for this. I really did cry." The longer the shoot went on, however, the more comfortable Mirren became with the queen's aggressively sober clothing.
"Yes. When I got all the elements together and started getting into the person I loved being the queen. It was partly to do with the complete lack of vanity. That is a very comfortable place to be. You maybe reach a point where your confidence takes you beyond vanity. You really don't care about the photographers snapping at you." Very different from being a film star.
"Yes indeed. Very unlike being a film star." Mirren has always positioned herself on the left and she admits she did come from a family ill-disposed towards the monarchy. Yet her comments above suggest she warmed to the queen while making the film.
"My feelings changed. I definitely thought, after doing the research, I am coming to appreciate this person. That happened as I tried to extricate the person from the institution, to separate her from the icon." Should we take it from this that she still doesn't approve of "the institution"? "Well, I have mellowed," she says, picking her words carefully. "Because it's very easy to just shout: 'Off with their heads!' Maybe in doing that you might lose something very valuable. I would like to see the monarchy continue, but in a more democratic fashion. If that is not a complete contradiction in terms."
Excellent as Mirren's compassionate performance is in The Queen - she manages to convey turbulent emotion through a stubbornly stoic facade - something faintly exotic still escapes the damp tweed and waxed cotton. The singular quality that has always hung around the actress could, perhaps, have something to do with her fascinating lineage. She may have been born in Chiswick and spent her girlhood in such unromantic locales as Southend, but Mirren's grandfather was a Russian nobleman and diplomat. Having brought his family to England while negotiating an arms deal, he was inconvenienced by the Russian Revolution and found himself unable to return home.
"I am very proud of the fact that I am the daughter of an immigrant," she says. "My family were, if you like, asylum seekers. Actually I have no idea how that all worked out legally. Perhaps they are going to come for me in the night some time soon and tell me to leave."
HELEN MIRREN, BORN Ilyena Lydia Mironoff on July 26th, 1945, grew up in a lower middle-class household. Her father, an old-school socialist who, like so many immigrants of that era, urged the family to assimilate, worked as a cabbie, a traffic examiner and a fabric merchant. He was, unsurprisingly, faintly appalled when, after training as a teacher, the young Helen announced she intended to become an actor. But she found success dizzyingly quickly. In 1965, aged just 21, she was cast as the female lead in a famous Royal Shakespeare Company production of Anthony and Cleopatra.
"My dreams and ambitions had been clear," she explains. "But I had no idea how to achieve them. The National Youth Theatre got me noticed by the RSC. That was everything. It launched me into a world that would otherwise have been impenetrable to a girl from Southend-on-Sea."
Mirren, though never a huge movie star, has been consistently before us ever since that big break. She appeared in Lindsay Anderson's sharp 1974 satire O Lucky Man!. She got up to all kinds of frightful business in Tinto Brass's near-pornographic Caligula. She played a saucy Morgana - and met future boyfriend Liam Neeson - on John Boorman's Excalibur in 1981. A decade later she created Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison for the first series of ITV's Prime Suspect (later this autumn the seventh and final instalment hits our screens). I wonder was there any point in her career where she felt under-employed.
"Never, thank goodness. I have always worked," she says. "I never had any sort of out-of-work period. I went through a period where I felt I wasn't getting roles I deserved. I wasn't breaking through to where I wanted to be. That went on for a long time, but I worked every year."
Yet for all the successes she has enjoyed over the decades, Mirren does acknowledge that 2006 is beginning to look like something of an annus mirabilis. Two weeks before she won the gong at Venice she was awarded an Emmy, television's version of the Oscar, for her title performance in Channel 4's Elizabeth I.
"I would say that it is the pinnacle of my work," she says. "It was an incredible role that required everything. I had to use all my emotional strength. I had to use all my imagination. Everything I had in my acting tool bag was called upon. It was the most demanding and satisfying thing I have done. On a daily basis I kept saying: 'You have to do this properly, Helen. This is the role.'"
Leafing through the reviews of Elizabeth I, one encounters a familiar theme. To a greater extent than earlier Virgin Queens - Bette Davis, Glenda Jackson, Judi Dench - Mirren is seen as bringing unusual carnality to the role. Let us return to that forensic analysis of perceptions of her sexuality. Mirren has a surprising theory here.
"It is very important for male actors to find femininity in with the testosterone. One of the reasons that Bruce Willis is such a good actor is that there is femininity in his performances. And, similarly, when people talk about my sexuality all the time I suspect they mean my blokeishness. I am very blokeish." Really? She drinks pints, burps and stays up late playing Grand Theft Auto? "No, not in that way," she laughs. "I love hair and make-up and all that stuff. But I loathe talking about feelings. I absolutely cannot stand it. I am very good at navigation. I can read maps. I suspect that is why people go on and on about my sexuality." I wonder if her husband can make any more sense of this than I can.
In 1985 Mirren began seeing Taylor Hackford, her director on that year's White Nights, and the couple have been together ever since. In 1997 they eventually got married. So, are they blokes together? "I do the navigation when we are in the car. And we certainly don't talk about feelings. Ever! Both of us find that sort of thing quite appalling. Yes, I think that one of the reasons we do get on so well is that we are both blokes."
Some years back, Hackford, who went on to direct fine films such as Ray and Dolores Claiborne, perkily told me that, when in London, he finds himself treated as Mr Helen Mirren. Since then she has become a Dame of the British Empire and has successfully played both Elizabeths. It looks as if she might be in danger of turning into a Great British Treasure.
"Oh I know," she says, looking slightly horrified. "But I am sure if that ever does happen, I will very quickly do something to blow it out of the water."
The Queen is on general release