As she publishes her memoir, Helen Mirren is truly acting royalty - but please don't call her Ma'am, she tells Michael Dwyer, Film Correspondent
In Terry George's Northern Ireland drama, Some Mother's Son, Helen Mirren movingly played a widowed middle-class teacher and staunch pacifist whose son (played by Aidan Gillen) joins the Provisional IRA and goes on hunger strike in prison. When the film was released in 1996, it became the subject of political controversy. Interviewing Mirren at the time, I quoted a US journalist's remark, "They'll never make her Dame Helen Mirren now." She responded then, "I lost that a long time ago". When I asked why, she said, "Well, I don't know. I've always been a bit cheeky." Seven years later, she was made a Dame. "Nothing took me more by surprise," she said when we met again last weekend at the Shelbourne hotel in Dublin.
"I think my investiture was an indication of how they were trying to diversify and get away from the fuddy-duddy people gripped to the British Empire. It wasn't like that at all the day I went. There was an Asian man who ran an after-school programme in Bradford and a black woman who had a children's programme. I was very happy to be there, very proud." Around the time we met in 1996, Prime Suspect 5 was about to be transmitted, and Mirren was resolute that it would be the last performance as detective Jane Tennison, although she went on to play the role twice more. "That's true," she said last weekend, "but I had to say then that would be the last one because I really wanted to wriggle free of it. However, the most recent one definitely is the end.
"It was a great series. What a wonderful thing to have that in my professional life. I got to work with great writers and directors. I loved having a character I could grow up and grow old with. She changes quite a lot throughout the series. It wasn't a character who stayed the same basically, like Inspector Morse. And it was always grounded in reality." When Granada Television made the first episode of Prime Suspect, she says there was "an absolute fear of a drama led by a woman" because they felt it wouldn't sell. "It's much better now because Prime Suspect has been so successful. Before we did it, there had been Cagney & Lacey, which was a cop series but, more importantly, a drama driven by two female characters, although it got a bit soap opera-ish later on."
LAST MONTH MIRREN received her fourth Emmy award, the US TV equivalent of the Oscar, for Prime Suspect: The Final Act, and Irish writer Frank Deasy collected an Emmy for the screenplay. "That was fantastic that Frank won," she says. "He was absolutely thrilled. I had received mine and I was backstage doing interviews. In came Frank and the director Philip Martin, holding their Emmys in what looked like a state of shock.
"Frank came on the project very late. The writer of the previous one had been working on it, but I think writers really have only one Prime Suspect in them. It's an incredibly challenging thing to write. Frank came on just about a month before shooting and we told him to be free, to make it his own. That is the only way it works, to give the writer as much freedom as possible. Frank brought so much to it. He writes absolutely from the heart. He wrote the first two hours in just two weeks, and they were perfect."
One of the rare flashes of humour in the series comes in the last episode when Tennison says, "Don't call me Ma'am. I'm not the bloody queen." By then Mirren had played Elizabeth I on TV and Elizabeth II in The Queen. "I put in that line," she laughs. "I couldn't resist it. It's actually a line I had in the first Prime Suspect, and I had the perfect opportunity to reprise it in the last one."
One of Mirren's first major awards came in 1984, when she was voted best actress at Cannes for Cal, the second of four films she has made in Ireland, preceded by Excalibur and followed by Some Mother's Son and The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone. The cast of Excalibur included Liam Neeson in his screen debut. In her recently published illustrated memoir, In the Frame, Mirren says: "I fell in love with Liam and with Ireland." Two pages of her book feature black-and-white photographs of Neeson. "Those contact sheets don't exist anymore now everything is digital," she says. "When Liam first came to live with me in London, he needed photographs as an actor. We couldn't afford a photographer, so I took all those pictures of him." They lived together for "four happy years", she says in her book, and she recalls how nervous she was - "I felt I was going to my own execution" - when she first went to meet his family in Ballymena, Co Antrim, which she notes is the home town of "that war-mongering priest, Ian Paisley". However, in her book, she recalls being "miserable" about the age difference between herself and Neeson. It was only about seven years, I point out. "No, eight," she says. "I wouldn't think twice about it now, but it was different back then. The whole attitude has changed now, although, in fact, women had always lived with men who were younger than them. My father was six years younger than my mother, so it wasn't as if I was brought up with the idea that it wasn't possible. It wasn't like I was 18. Of course, if I was 18, Liam would have been 10." She laughs heartily at that concept. "That would not be a good idea. It would have been illegal!"
By a remarkable coincidence, the hotel suite we are in is named after Michael Collins. "Oh, yes," she smiles. "I noticed that, too. I couldn't believe it. And Liam was wonderful in that role. He was fabulous. He should at least have got an Oscar nomination for his performance. He really became the character."
On the subject of Oscars, I mention that the Internet Movie Database calculates that she has won 62 awards for her work in film and television. Where does she keep them all? "Of course, a lot of them are just on paper. I've spread them around. I've some in Los Angeles, but I brought my Oscar back to Europe. I thought he would be happier here than in America. There's less of him in Europe." Mirren had won a succession of awards for The Queen before Oscar night came around last February. Was she nervous she might stumble at the last hurdle? "No, not at all," she says. "By then I had done so many awards shows. By the time I got to the Oscars, everyone was saying I was going to win, so whether I won or not, I felt totally cool with whatever happened. I'd had such a great ride up to that point. It was such a compliment to my performance.
"That completely took me by surprise because when I was nominated for an Oscar twice before, I was the dark horse. I was so below the radar, not even mentioned in the newspapers, and then suddenly I was so above the radar. I was completely relaxed - no beating heart. When they read out my name, everything closed down for a second. Then there was the worst part, the speech, but by then I had done a lot of speeches. I have to say, to my credit, that every single one was completely different and none of them was scripted. I had a general idea of what route I would take if I had to, but no, I never pulled a piece of paper out of my bag."
Irish costume designer Consolata Boyle - whose work Mirren describes as one of "the building blocks of my performance" - also received an Oscar nomination for The Queen. "She was wonderful, such a detailed perfectionist, and with those dresses, it wasn't just that they had to vaguely look right, they had to feel right. They had to totally be right, and Consolata constructed these dresses that I know the queen would have felt comfortable in. Of course, the flashy costumes always win, and they gave the award to Marie Antoinette, a terrible film."
IN HER EARLY years as an actor, Mirren, now 62, went to see a hand reader who predicted that she would be successful in life, but would see her greatest success later, after the age of 45. "That's not what you want to hear when you're 25," she says. "You want it now. I've worked in film as an actress for decades, but I don't think I've ever really had a film career as such. There's a difference. I was never destined to be a film star. I will always be an actress who works in film.
"British films sucked when I started. It was mostly Carry On films and Confessions of a Window Cleaner and things like that. I did what I could. That was why I often appeared in weird movies like Caligula, because I needed to work in film." Malcolm McDowell, John Gielgud and Peter O'Toole joined her in the cast of that 1979 movie, which was written by Gore Vidal and directed by Tinto Brass. However, the producer was Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione, and it became notorious when he inserted hardcore footage shot with other actors.
"But honestly, Gore's script was full of sex and violence," Mirren says. "I saw the film recently for the first time. They have re-edited it for DVD, so you can see Tinto's version and the Penthouse version separately, and I was doing a commentary for the DVD. I hadn't seen it before because it's not my kind of movie. It is relentless - sex, violence, sex, violence - and that can become amazingly tedious. But it was a great experience for me, and I've never denigrated it or denied it."
Looking ahead, she hopes to work again with her husband Taylor Hackford, who directed Ray and An Officer and a Gentleman. They met when he cast her in White Nights (1985). "We're crossing our fingers and really hoping against hope that we will work together next year, on a very American subject, but I can't say any more about it now."
Her next film will be Kevin Macdonald's US remake of the BBC mini-series, State of Play, in which journalists uncover a political scandal. In the TV version, Bill Nighy played the newspaper editor, the role Mirren will play in the film with Brad Pitt as her chief reporter. When she remarks that not many newspaper editors are women, I mention that the editor of The Irish Times is a woman, Geraldine Kennedy. "I would love to meet her," she says, sitting upright. "Do you think I could visit her? That would be great." And they met the following day.