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| Birth Name(s) : Ilynea Lydia Mironoff |
Date of Birth: July 26, 1945 |
| Status:
Married
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Partner:
Taylor Hackford |
| Profession:
Actor |
Official Site
Go to the Helen Mirren Official Homepage |
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Full Helen Mirren Biography
Commanding Brit ish actress who has proven her versatility and range in a series of consistently challenging parts. She began her career on stage with Britain's National Youth Theatre and later, the Royal Shakespeare Company, winning acclaim for performances in plays like "Troilus and Cressida" and "Hamlet." She made her film debut as Hermia in Peter Hall's version of A Midsummer Night's Dream (1968), and alternated between theater and movies from then on, costarring in Age of Consent (1969), Savage Messiah (1972), O Lucky Man! (1973), Hussy and Caligula (both 1980) before eliciting raves for her turn as gangster Bob Hoskins' mistress in The Long Good Friday (1981).
More recently, she starred in The Comfort of Strangers (1991), the adaptation of Where Angels Fear to Tread (also 1991, as Lilia), Dr. Bethune, The Hawk (both 1993), and most notably, as "Mrs. King" in The Madness of King George (1994), for which she received a Supporting Actress Oscar nomination. She also starred as a tough police inspector in the acclaimed British TV miniseries "Prime Suspect" (1992-).
Many actresses are described as "fearless," but the word really applies to Mirren, who can-and will-do anything that befits her character-and who is drawn to unusual, provocative parts. She has lived for many years with producer/director Taylor Hackford. |
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Additional Helen Mirren Biography
Dame Helen Mirren, DBE (born July 26, 1945), is an English stage, television and film actress. She has won an Academy Award, four SAG Awards and assorted BAFTAs, Golden Globes and Emmy Awards during her career.
On 5 December 2003, she was invested as a Dame Commander of the British Empire. When she received the honour, Mirren commented that Prince Charles was "very graceful" but forgot to give her half of the award, where another person had to remind him to give Mirren the star. She also stated that she felt wary about accepting the award and had to be persuaded by fellow comrades to accept the DBE. In 1996 she had previously declined a CBE.
Mirren's autobiography was published in the UK by Weidenfeld and Nicholson in September 2007, under the title In the Frame: My Life in Words and Pictures.
Following appearances on stage during her school years at St Bernard's High School for Girls in Westcliff-on-Sea, Mirren's first starring role was in 1965 as Cleopatra for the National Youth Theatre. This led to her joining the Royal Shakespeare Company, playing Castiza in Trevor Nunn's 1966 staging of The Revenger's Tragedy, Cressida in Troilus and Cressida in 1968 and the title role in Miss Julie at The Other Place in 1971. In 1972-73 Mirren worked with Peter Brook's International Centre for Theatre Research, and joined the group's tour in North Africa and the US which created The Conference of the Birds. Returning to the RSC she played Lady Macbeth at Stratford in 1974 and at the Aldwych Theatre in 1975.
Her performance as Moll Cutpurse in The Roaring Girl at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in January 1983, and at the Barbican Theatre April 1983), "swaggered through the action with radiant singularity of purpose, filling in areas of light and shade that even Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker omitted." - Michael Coveney, Financial Times, April 1983. After a relatively barren sojourn in the Hollywood Hills, she returned to England at the beginning of 1989 to co-star with Bob Peck at the Young Vic in the London premiere of the Arthur Miller double-bill, Two Way Mirror, performances which prompted Miller to remark: "What is so good about English actors is that they are not afraid of the open expression of large emotions" (interview by Sheridan Morley: The Times 11 January 1989). In Elegy for a Lady she played the svelte proprietress of a classy boutique, while as the blonde hooker in Some Kind of Love Story she was "clad in a Freudian slip and shifting easily from waif-like vulnerability to sexual aggression, giving the role a breathy Monroesque quality" (Michael Billington, The Guardian).
A stage career breakthrough came in 1994, in an Yvonne Arnaud Theatre production bound for the West End, when Bill Bryden cast her as Natalya Petrovna in Ivan Turgenev's A Month in the Country. Her co-stars were John Hurt as her aimless lover Rakitin and Ralph Fiennes in only his second professional stage appearance as the cocksure young tutor Belyaev. "Instead of a bored Natalya fretting the summmer away in dull frocks, Mirren, dazzlingly gowned, is a woman almost wilfully allowing her heart's desire for her son's young tutor to rule her head and wreak domestic havoc....Creamy shoulders bared, she feels free to launch into a gloriously enchanted, dreamily comic self-confession of love." (John Thaxter, Richmond & Twickenham Times, 4 March 1994).
In 1984, Mirren won Best Actress for her role in the film Cal at the Cannes Film Festival and the 1985 Evening Standard British Film Awards. In 1994 and 2001, she was nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her roles in The Madness of King George and Gosford Park, respectively. In 1995, she had also been awarded for Best Actress once again in Cannes for playing Queen Charlotte in The Madness of King George. In 2002, she received the SAG Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture for Gosford Park. Mirren is the first female actress to be nominated for three acting performances at the Golden Globe Awards in the same year. She won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Leading Role in the movie drama category for Stephen Frears' The Queen in 2006 (along with two nominations in the Actress in a Mini-series or TV Movie category for Elizabeth I, and Prime Suspect: Final Act). She won both Golden Globes for The Queen and Elizabeth I and also won two SAG awards the same year for the same roles. Mirren is the third actor to win two Golden Globes in the same year, and the first ever to win for both leading roles in TV and film in the same year. She is one of only three actresses ( the first was Liza Minnelli in 1973 and also decades later Helen Hunt) to win a Golden Globe, an Oscar and an Emmy for performances given in the same year.
At the end of a triumphant year of awards for her acclaimed movie performance as Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen, Dame Helen also collected a 2007 Emmy Television award as Best Actress in a Mini-Series for her performance as Detective Superintendent Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect: The Final Act. She now has four Emmy awards. This seventh and apparently concluding instalment of the Prime Suspect saga portrayed Tennison as an alcoholic destined for retirement, and was screened in the US on the public service network PBS. |
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Helen Mirren Quote(s)
| Actors are rogues and vagabonds. Or they ought to be. I can't stand it when they behave like solicitors from Penge." "I'm a would-be rebel. The good girl who'd like to be a bad one. |
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