Helen Mirren
Dame Helen Mirren is an English actor. Regarded amongst Britain's greatest actors, Mirren is the recipient of several accolades including an Academy Award, three Golden Globe Awards, four BAFTA Awards, five Emmy Awards, a Tony Award, two Cannes Film Festival Awards, a Volpi Cup and a Laurence Olivier Award. She is the only person to have achieved both the US and UK Triple Crowns of Acting, and has also received the BAFTA Fellowship, Honorary Golden Bear, Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award, and the Cecil B. DeMille Award. Mirren was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in 2003.
Mirren started her career at the age of 18 as a performer with the National Youth Theatre, where she played Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra. She later joined the Royal Shakespeare Company and made her West End stage debut in 1975. She went on to receive the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress for playing Elizabeth II in the Peter Morgan play The Audience. She reprised the role on Broadway and won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play. She was Tony-nominated for A Month in the Country and The Dance of Death.
Mirren's first credited film role was in Herostratus and her first major role was in Age of Consent. She gained further recognition for her roles in O Lucky Man!, Caligula, The Long Good Friday, Excalibur, The Mosquito Coast, and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. Mirren has received four Academy Award nominations for her performances in The Madness of King George ''Gosford Park, The Last Station, winning the Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of Elizabeth II in The Queen. She went on to appear in further films such as The Tempest, Hitchcock, Eye in the Sky, and Trumbo. She has also appeared in the action film Red and its 2013 sequel, as well as four films in the Fast & Furious franchise.
On television, Mirren played DCI Jane Tennison in ITV's police procedural Prime Suspect, for which she earned three British Academy Television Awards for Best Actress and two Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or Movie. She also earned Emmy Awards for portraying Ayn Rand in the Showtime television film The Passion of Ayn Rand and Queen Elizabeth I in the HBO miniseries Elizabeth I. Her other television roles include Door to Door, Phil Spector, Catherine the Great, 1923, and MobLand''.
Early life, family and education
Ilyena Lydia Mironoff was born on 26 July 1945 at Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital in the Hammersmith district of London, to an English mother and Russian father. Her mother, Kathleen "Kitty" Alexandrina Eva Matilda, was a working-class woman from West Ham, the thirteenth of fourteen children born to a butcher whose own father was the butcher to Queen Victoria. Mirren's father, Vasily Petrovich Mironoff, was a member of an exiled family of Russian nobility dating back to the first half of the 15th century. He was taken to England when he was two by his father, Pyotr Vasilievich Mironov. Pyotr Vasilievich Mironov owned a large family estate near Gzhatsk in the Russian Empire. His mother, Mirren's great-grandmother, was Countess Lydia Andreevna Kamenskaya, an aristocrat and a descendant of Count Mikhail Fedotovich Kamensky, a Russian general in the Napoleonic Wars. Her grandfather, Pyotr Vasilievich Mironov, also served as a colonel in the Imperial Russian Army and fought in the Russo-Japanese War. He later became a diplomat in the service of Nicholas II and was negotiating an arms deal in Britain when he and his family were stranded by the Russian Revolution in 1917. He settled in London and became a cab driver to support his family.Vasily Mironoff also played the viola with the London Philharmonic Orchestra before World War II. He was an ambulance driver during the war, and served in the East End of London during the Blitz. He and Kathleen Rogers married in Hammersmith in 1938, and at some point before 1951 he anglicised his first name to Basil. Shortly after Helen's birth, her father left the orchestra and returned to driving a cab to support the family. He later worked as a driving-test examiner, then became a civil servant with the Ministry of Transport. In 1951, he changed the family name to Mirren by deed poll. Mirren considers her upbringing to have been "very anti-monarchist". She was the second of three children; she has an older sister Katherine and had a younger brother Peter Basil. Her paternal cousin was Tania Mallet, a model and Bond girl. Mirren was brought up in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex.
Mirren attended Hamlet Court primary school in Westcliff-on-Sea, where she had the lead role in a school production of Hansel and Gretel, and St Bernard's High School for Girls in Southend-on-Sea, where she also acted in school productions. She subsequently attended a teaching college, the New College of Speech and Drama in London, "housed within Anna Pavlova's old home, Ivy House" on North End Road in Golders Green. At the age of eighteen, she passed the audition for the National Youth Theatre ; and at twenty, she played Cleopatra in the NYT production of Antony and Cleopatra at the Old Vic, a role which she says "launched my career" and led to her signing with agent Albert Parker.
Career
1965–1979: Royal Shakespeare Company and acclaim
As a result of her work for the National Youth Theatre, Mirren was invited to join the Royal Shakespeare Company. While with the RSC, she played Castiza in Trevor Nunn's 1966 staging of The Revenger's Tragedy, Diana in All's Well That Ends Well, Cressida in Troilus and Cressida, Rosalind in As You Like It, Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Tatiana in Gorky's Enemies at the Aldwych, and the title role in Miss Julie at The Other Place. She also appeared in four productions, directed by Braham Murray for Century Theatre at the University Theatre in Manchester, between 1965 and 1967.In 1970, the director and producer John Goldschmidt made a documentary film, Doing Her Own Thing, about Mirren during her time with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Made for ATV, it was shown on the ITV network in the UK. In 1972 and 1973, Mirren worked with Peter Brook's International Centre for Theatre Research and joined the group's tour in North Africa and the US, during which they created The Conference of the Birds. She then rejoined the RSC, playing Lady Macbeth at Stratford in 1974 and at the Aldwych Theatre in 1975. In 1976, she appeared with Laurence Olivier, Alan Bates and Malcolm McDowell in a production of Harold Pinter's The Collection as part of the Laurence Olivier Presents series.
Sally Beauman reported, in her 1982 history of the RSC, that Mirren—while appearing in Nunn's Macbeth, and in a letter to The Guardian newspaper—had sharply criticised both the National Theatre and the RSC for their lavish production expenditure, declaring it "unnecessary and destructive to the art of the Theatre", and adding, "The realms of truth, emotion and imagination reached for in acting a great play have become more and more remote, often totally unreachable across an abyss of costume and technicalities..." This started a big debate, and led to a question in parliament. There were no discernible repercussions for this rebuke of the RSC.
At the West End's Royal Court Theatre in September 1975, she played the role of a rock star named Maggie in Teeth 'n' Smiles, a musical play by David Hare; she reprised the role the following year in a revival of the play at Wyndham's Theatre in May 1976. Beginning in November 1975, Mirren played in West End repertory with the Lyric Theatre Company as Nina in The Seagull and Ella in Ben Travers's new farce The Bed Before Yesterday. At the RSC in Stratford in 1977, and at the Aldwych the following year, she played a steely Queen Margaret in Terry Hands' production of the three parts of Henry VI, while 1979 saw her 'bursting with grace', and winning acclaim for her performance as Isabella in Peter Gill's production of Measure for Measure at Riverside Studios. Mirren has appeared in a large number of films throughout her career. Some of her earlier film appearances include roles in Herostratus, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Age of Consent, and O Lucky Man!.
1980–1999: Early film roles and ''Prime Suspect''
In 1981, Mirren returned to the Royal Court for the London premiere of Brian Friel's Faith Healer. That same year she also won acclaim for her performance in the title role of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, a production of Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre which was later transferred to The Roundhouse in Chalk Farm, London. Reviewing her portrayal for The Sunday Telegraph, Francis King wrote: "Miss Mirren never leaves it in doubt that even in her absences, this ardent, beautiful woman is the most important character of the story." In her performance as Moll Cutpurse in The Roaring Girl—at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in January 1983, and at the Barbican Theatre in April 1983—she was described as having "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. During this time, Mirren took roles in Caligula, The Long Good Friday —co-starring with Bob Hoskins in what was her breakthrough film role, Excalibur, 2010, White Nights, The Mosquito Coast, Pascali's Island and When the Whales Came. Mirren's television performances include Cousin Bette ; As You Like It ; Blue Remembered Hills ; and The Twilight Zone episode "Dead Woman's Shoes".At the beginning of 1989, Mirren co-starred 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. British actors like to speak. In London, there's a much more open-hearted kind of exchange between stage and audience". 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".
Mirren is known for her role as detective Jane Tennison in the widely viewed Prime Suspect, a multiple award-winning television drama series that was noted for its high quality and popularity. Her portrayal of Tennison won her three consecutive British Academy Television Awards for Best Actress between 1992 and 1994. Primarily due to Prime Suspect, in 2006 Mirren came 29th on ITV's poll of TV's 50 Greatest Stars voted by the British public. A further stage 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 Joseph Fiennes in only his second professional stage appearance as the cocksure young tutor Belyaev. Prior to 2015, Mirren had twice been nominated for Broadway's Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play: in 1995 for her Broadway debut in A Month in the Country and then again in 2002 for The Dance of Death, co-starring with Sir Ian McKellen, their fraught rehearsal period coinciding with the terrorist attacks on New York on 11 September 2001.
Mirren appeared in The Madness of King George, Some Mother's Son, Painted Lady and The Prince of Egypt. In Peter Greenaway's colourful The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Mirren plays the wife opposite Michael Gambon. In Teaching Mrs. Tingle, she plays sadistic history teacher Mrs. Eve Tingle. In 1998, Mirren played Cleopatra to Alan Rickman's Antony in Antony and Cleopatra at the National Theatre. The production received poor reviews; The Guardian called it "plodding spectacle rarely informed by powerful passion", while The Daily Telegraph said "the crucial sexual chemistry on which any great production ultimately depends is fatally absent". In 2000 Nicholas Hytner, who had worked with Mirren on the film version of The Madness of King George, cast her as Lady Torrance in his revival of Tennessee Williams' Orpheus Descending at the Donmar Warehouse in London. Michael Billington, reviewing for The Guardian, described her performance as "an exemplary study of an immigrant woman who has acquired a patina of resilient toughness but who slowly acknowledges her sensuality."