Helen Mirren

Helen Mirren (born July 26, 1945, London, England) British actress especially known for her role as Detective Jane Tennison on the television series Prime Suspect (1991–96, 2003, and 2006) and for her subtle and sympathetic portrayal of Elizabeth II in The Queen (2006), for which she won an Academy Award.

Early life and stage career

Mirren was born in London of a Russian-born father and a Scottish mother. (The family’s last name was Mironoff until Helen’s father decided to Anglicize it when she was 10 years old.) She joined Britain’s National Youth Theatre at age 18 and the Royal Shakespeare Company a year later. She spent a large part of the next 15 years working with the latter, appearing in such roles as Cressida in Troilus and Cressida and Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra.

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While still starring in theatre productions, Mirren began her film career in her early 20s. Her first film to be released was A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1968), which was followed by dozens of others, including the English gangster movie The Long Good Friday (1980); the King Arthur spoof Excalibur (1981); and a love story set in Northern Ireland, Cal (1984), for which she won the best actress award at the Cannes film festival. Mirren later played the unfaithful wife of a grotesque English thief in the controversial The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (1989) and Queen Charlotte in The Madness of King George (1994), a role for which she was nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar. In 1997 she married director Taylor Hackford.

Mirren extended her successful film career into the 21st century. She was nominated a second time for a best supporting actress Oscar, for her role as an English housekeeper in Robert Altman’s Gosford Park (2001). In Calendar Girls (2003) she played a middle-aged Yorkshire woman who convinces her friends to pose nude for a calendar benefiting leukemia research. Mirren won both a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Award and an Academy Award for best actress for The Queen (2006), a fictionalized account of the ineffectual response of Elizabeth II to the untimely death of Diana, princess of Wales, in 1997. She subsequently appeared in the adventure movie National Treasure: Book of Secrets (2007) and portrayed a newspaper editor in the thriller State of Play (2009).

Later films

Mirren’s later film roles continued to demonstrate her versatility. Her supporting turn as Leo Tolstoy’s wife, Sofya, in The Last Station (2009) earned her a fourth Oscar nomination. She then portrayed a former CIA assassin in the action comedy Red (2010) and, in a bit of cross-gender casting, starred in Julie Taymor’s 2010 film adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest as the sorceress Prospera (originally Prospero). Mirren appeared as a brassy busybody in Brighton Rock (2010), an adaptation of the Graham Greene crime novel, and as a no-nonsense nanny in the comedy Arthur (2011). In the political thriller The Debt (2011), she played a former Mossad agent grappling with her past.

In 2012 Mirren portrayed Alma Reville, the wife of filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock, in the biographical Hitchcock. The following year she provided a voice for the animated Monsters University and returned to the steely role she had played in Red for the film’s sequel, Red 2. She crossed blades with Indian actor Om Puri in The Hundred-Foot Journey (2014), in which the two played the owners of competing restaurants. In Woman in Gold (2015) Mirren portrayed Maria Altmann, a Jewish refugee who successfully sued the Austrian government to recover paintings by Gustav Klimt stolen from her family by the Nazis during World War II. Eye in the Sky (2015) featured Mirren as a British colonel who faces a moral dilemma while remotely commanding a military operation in Kenya intended to apprehend a terrorist.

Mirren’s subsequent movies from this period included the drama Collateral Beauty (2016), the sentimental comedy The Leisure Seeker (2017), and the period horror film Winchester (2018). She played the villainous Mother Ginger in The Nutcracker and the Four Realms (2018), an adaptation of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s 19th-century ballet. Among her film credits from 2019 were the thriller Anna, in which she portrayed the KGB handler of a model-turned-assassin, and The Good Liar, a cat-and-mouse drama that also featured Ian McKellen. In The Duke (2020), a dramedy based on a true story, Mirren was cast as the wife of a taxi driver who steals a famous painting. She then appeared in F9: The Fast Saga (2021), an installment in the Fast and Furious action series. In 2023 she provided the voice of the narrator in Barbie, Greta Gerwig’s film about the iconic doll.

Television work and Broadway

In addition to her film work, Mirren starred in various television roles. Her most-notable performance was as Jane Tennison, a tough detective constantly under pressure to prove that she can succeed in a traditionally male field, in the BBC television series Prime Suspect. The show aired for seven seasons and earned her three BAFTA Awards (1992–94) and two Emmy Awards (1996 and 2007). She also won Emmy Awards for titular performances in the TV movie The Passion of Ayn Rand (1999) and the miniseries Elizabeth I (2005). In the HBO movie Phil Spector (2013), about the titular record producer’s first murder trial, she portrayed a tenacious defense attorney. In 2019 Mirren was cast in the role of another strong-willed monarch in the HBO miniseries Catherine the Great, about the empress of Russia. Two years later she appeared in the sci-fi anthology series Solos. She then costarred with Harrison Ford in 1923 (2022– ), a prequel to the hugely popular series Yellowstone. Mirren was cast as the matriarch of a ranching family in Montana.

Mirren made her Broadway debut in 1995 as Natalya in Ivan Turgenev’s A Month in the Country, and she returned in 2002 in August Strindberg’s The Dance of Death; both performances generated Tony Award nominations. Additional British stage credits included Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending (2000) and Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra (2003). She received a Laurence Olivier Award for The Audience (2013), for which she reprised the role of Queen Elizabeth II. Mirren also garnered a Tony Award for her performance in a 2015 Broadway production of the play.

Mirren was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 2003.