I want my life to continue with passion until my last days... I see life as a gift to enjoy
The phrase “looks good for her age” doesn’t really cut it when it comes to Dame Helen Mirren –even at 72, the star looks good for most ages. But she won’t have it, of course. “I’ve never seen myself as a so-called sex symbol,” she scoffs.
“I’ve always just let other people get on with that. I just do the best I can. I do my job and get on with it, basically.”
Most actors shy from discussing digits after the age of 30 yet the no-nonsense Oscar winner is not only comfortable discussing her 70-plus years, she is – shock, horror – more than happy to contemplate death, too.
“Well, yes, and why not? It’s not something you can hide from at my age and why not have an open discussion and see death as full of life and a celebration of liberation,” she says.
“I want to continue with passion for life and love until the last days. I see life as a gift and I enjoy it. I embrace it.”
Which might just explain why she happens to look so very good.
A much-lauded red bikini photo seems to prove the point. In 2008 Helen was holidaying on the southern tip of Italy with her film director husband Taylor Hackford when she was snapped looking stunning in the costume.
EWith husband Taylor
ditors of beauty pages the world over clamoured to know her secret. Helen laughs: “A week before I’d been on a beach in Cannes – one of those where you go and pay and lie with 25 million other people. Not a single person took a photo of me.”
While death seems a distant prospect for the exuberant star, she has been contemplating it because of her latest movie, The Leisure Seeker.
In the film she plays cancer victim Ella who goes on a road trip with her Alzheimer’s-suffering husband John, played by Donald Sutherland, to embrace what life they have left.
“I like pushing a message of how extraordinary and beautiful life can be,” she explains. “This is a love story and a life story and a liberation story. A liberation from life and what I mean by that is a liberation from the trappings of life.”
The talk in the industry is that Helen’s is again an Oscar-worthy performance.
But she says: “Well, I would say
TALKING ABOUT HER LATEST MOVIE, THE LEISURE SEEKER
Donald will dominate that sphere. His performance is up there with his best.” She hopes audiences might come away with “the sense of continuing to be a positive force in life”.
Embarking on her eighth decade, she is living life to the full.
The Leisure Seeker comes at the end of an exhausting three-year run of nearly a dozen movies, including The Hundred-foot Journey, Woman in Gold, Trumbo, Eye In The Sky and Collateral Beauty.
And yet you sense she’s only revving up, with upcoming roles in three more films while jet-setting and enjoying homes in Britain, Los Angeles and Italy, where she’s learning the language.
It’s a relatively new A-list status. She grew up in Leigh-on-sea, Essex, where her mum’s family were butchers. Her paternal grandfather, Col Pyotr Vasilievich Mironov, was in the Imperial Russian Army and later a diplomat.
He was stranded in Britain during the Russian Revolution and became a cabbie to support his family. Helen spent most of the first half of her career working in the theatre, learning her craft with the Royal Shakespeare Company from 1967, with a few notable film roles such as 1981’s Excalibur.
In the 90s TV came knocking and her role as DCI Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect stretched across seven series. But she never truly made it in Hollywood until movie roles in the Noughties catapulted her to award-winning status.
In 2007 Helen reached the pinnacle, winning an Oscar for her performance in The Queen and today she is a Hollywood heavyweight. She admires actresses and actors who are today speaking out about sexual harassment and abuse in the industry.
“It’s a cultural shift long overdue,” she says. “I think the ripple effect will be enormous, mainly for the young 18-year-old new actress or actor, deciding to give acting a go and facing into a world which I believe will look vastly different from when I made my first steps.”
Yet her advice remains to take chances, as she has done – as long as that’s on your own terms.
The Leisure Seeker has only taught her to heed her own advice even more closely. “People who survive a
I like pushing a message of how extraordinary and beautiful life can be – a love story DAME HELEN