Dame Helen Mirren The Many Faces of...

What exactly did you do?

One of the great British actors of all time.

Thanks.

She's best known as a woman in a man's world.

Pretty matchless, I think,

in terms of what she does and what she brings to the screen.

There is a real roll-up-your-sleeves,

get-on-with-it quality to her, which is very attractive,

as well as being the most glamorous woman in Britain.

An actress of power...

Go anywhere you please!

I hate you!

..and versatility.

So she took her clothes off. So?

So what?

One of the toughest pensioners on Hollywood screens.

Of course, she's part of the establishment now,

but she's the rebel in the group, you know, she's still the one

who can do things that are unexpected and surprise us.

These are the Many Faces of Dame Helen Mirren.

No more riddles now.

Dame Helen Mirren is one of Britain's biggest screen stars.

She emerged in the 1960s as a fresh young actress

ready for the challenges of a new generation.

Won't be rid of my musty husband.

A favourite of avant-garde theatre and film, she found a national

audience and redefined television cop shows in Prime Suspect.

We've got him!

We've got him!

Since then, Helen's performances have continually driven back

the boundaries for actresses of mature years.

And while she appears on movie posters alongside Bruce Willis,

she is just as happy back on a London stage.

Miss Penelope Squires!

The first time we see Helen Mirren on screen, she's only 21,

and it's literally a walk-on part

in the Norman Wisdom slapstick Press For Time.

It's an isolated walk-on part for a young lady

who is consumed by the excitement of serious theatre.

She had joined the National Youth Theatre at age 18,

and very soon was playing Cleopatra at the Old Vic theatre.

I started in the Youth Theatre.

It gave me all my opportunities when I was a schoolgirl, and as far

outside of the magical realms of theatre as you could possibly imagine.

Antony and Cleopatra was my, you know, big one.

I did that at the Old Vic. An incredible experience.

I also did Midsummer Night's Dream,

and I was a walk-on in Coriolanus and in Hamlet.

And it was an invaluable experience for me.

By the time she was 20, she was playing major roles for The Royal

Shakespeare Company and tackling versions of the classics for TV.

I'll let you down the back way.

But I don't know the way home, so I don't.

My man shall wait upon you.

What? Are you weary of me already?

No, my life.

It is that I may love you long to secure my love

and your reputation with your husband.

He may not know you again else.

Do you think to frighten me with that?

What care I for my husband?

I don't intend to go to him again! You shall be my husband now.

Working with the Royal Shakespeare Company,

working in the West End, working with the National Theatre,

that gave her some weight and some experience

that perhaps younger actresses now aren't going to get.

Good morning.

Is Philip in, by any chance?

I believe he's in the bath.

Really? Alone?

I think so.

You're slipping.

Helen Mirren was just 24 years old

when she starred in her first film feature, Age Of Consent.

She is the innocent muse helping artist James Mason

rediscover his mojo.

She plays an innocent island girl

who's not quite as vulnerable as she seems.

It's the dress.

Take it off.

Mirren has always been pretty unafraid

to take off her clothes when the part demanded it.

I think because there's this kind of muse-like quality about her.

There's a scene in this film where she goes out on a boat with

this rather sleazy local fishermen, who essentially attempts to rape

her, comes onto her on this boat,

knowing she can't get away.

Get off me, Teddy Farrell!

How dare you!

Beauty!

Oh! Bleugh!

Ow!

Come on!

Get your gear off, Cora. Ow!

And she's chewing gum, and she spits the gum into the water

and goes round and round him,

as a shark might circle one of its victims.

You crazy virgin!

And then when he's tired and apologetic, and has got the point,

she throws a rope out to him, and tows him back to the island.

She's in her very early 20s when she is doing this.

She has incredible self-assurance, even if sometimes, the part,

as it is written, doesn't.

It's the carefree '60s,

and there's a revolution in art, music and fashion.

In theatre and film, boundaries are being broken.

The Body Beautiful is just one symbol of rebellion

and innovation for the new generation.

True lion hunts

She plots his death

Death for him, death for me

The knife is sharp and I must die Since I came here with him.

It's theatre that excites young Helen.

There was one point I remember, very early on,

when there was a choice,

direct choice between doing a film with a very good part in it,

and going back to the RSC to do, I think it was to do Troilus

and Cressida, very, very early on in my career,

and I decided to go to the RSC to do Troilus and Cressida.

I was so thrilled by the idea of doing Cressida.

What I've done in the theatre will stand me

in stead for the rest of my life.

Aged just 30, she won a Variety Club Award for stage actress

of the year for her first West End performance.

I have some lines in The Seagull which I think are particularly

apt to this gathering, and certainly to myself at this moment,

which go, "I know now that what matters is not fame or glory

"or any of those things I used to dream about,

"but what matters most is to know how to endure." Thank you very much.

Our deaths will not be unavenged. He will come, our vengeance.

The King is dead!

Do you want me?

But Helen was attracting attention in the popular press.

In the experimental film Herostratus in 1967,

the public were introduced to Helen the sex siren.

In Herostratus, we see her very, very exposed,

in an experimental film.

I think she was just in the one scene, and she's extremely young

and extremely buxom, and scantily clad, and it's kind of a gag,

because she's selling something,

it's sort of like she's selling herself, and in the end,

it turns out that what she's selling are these rubber gloves.

It's a kind of comment about advertising

and how advertising uses sex to sell.

They're absolutely leak-proof!

Use them for all your dirty work! Yeah!

I wonder what she thinks when she looks back on that.

She's not in the least bit prudish,

I can't imagine that she would be ashamed of it,

but it's quite something to look back on, I imagine.

She's so young and beautiful,

and there's an innocence about it, even though it's overtly sexual.

From the early performances, she's never been afraid of being sexual

on-screen, you know, but it's never just for the sake of it.

She's never been a bimbo, you know, "I just want to show off my body."

She's been someone who played tough characters,

and their sexuality is part of that character,

so you never feel with Helen Mirren that it's just gratuitous.

We have a laugh about it,

it's a bit of a joke about her performances, but it's not like

she is, you know, some dolly bird, like Pamela Anderson, or something.

She's doing it because these characters are really strong,

provocative people.

Helen's involvement in a truly notorious film of the '70s

confirmed her uninhibited image.

She joined a respectable cast on a film about the excesses

of the Roman emperor Caligula.

It was always going to be edgy, but producers later hired more actors

and added scenes of graphic sex.

I think, with Caligula, it is porn, basically,

and I don't think Helen Mirren would disagree with that.

I don't think that's what she went into it for.

I mean, Caligula as a whole history,

there's a whole documentary itself about what the actors thought

it was going to be, and what the producer wanted it to be,

so I think a movie like that was perhaps a mistake, really.

I think it's absolutely explicable in the context of everything

else she did in that period, and the general tenor of the times, too.

It wasn't such a far out thing.

There were a lot of people who thought that pornography

of this kind would be what saves cinema, would be what was up

on the big screen, and the taboo about it would vanish,

and it would become just a part of everybody's cinematic lives,

and Mirren has always been in the vanguard of things.

This is why she did so much stuff in the '70s and '80s

where she took her clothes off, where she was shameless,

in the best sense of that word.

The '60s and '70s had shown us two sides of Helen Mirren.

She was an award-winning theatre actress with a love of Shakespeare

who was equally at home in the West End,

and a fledgling cinema star,

unafraid of bold, experimental roles.

As a new decade dawned,

she was a respected actress but relatively unknown on screen.

But things were starting to change.

The Long Good Friday paired Helen with Bob Hoskins.

Where's Harris?

Please tell me, love.

It was a breakthrough film for Hoskins

as an East End London gangster trying to go legit.

Helen Mirren plays his posh girlfriend

dragged into a spiral of violence,

the respectable front for his dodgy property deal.

Give me the gun!

Now you've got Harris, right? You've got him.

Now you use him.

You use him to stop this bloody havoc!

And there she is.

She's charming all of these ghastly American gangsters

that he's brought over to invest in this property deal.

Bob Hoskins' world is being undermined,

is being attacked by a third party who wants to spoil this deal,

and he's killing his men, blowing up his pubs, this kind of thing.

Occupy them.

Do anything that's necessary. Just buy me some time, right?

-Yeah. I'll take them to Justine's.

-Terrific.

-Get Razors to book a table.

-Yeah.

It was the gas!

Gas?

This natural gas causes dangerous leaks sometimes.

Howard wants us to go on to a restaurant

while he's dealing with it.

He'll join us later. Jeff, stay with Harold, will you? I'll drive.

And Helen Mirren has to hold the fort

in a scene in a restaurant where all of these men round

the table know there's something fishy going on,

but she has two maintain this front for the good of her partner,

and there's something that she's so good at that, the presentation

of a rather brittle barrier

towards other characters.

OK, Victoria. I'll give you until tomorrow.

But just one more foul up, and we're on our way back home.

That goes without saying.

What's so good is that she gives you the sense of something going on

behind the performance, something that you can't quite glimpse.

She's very good at projecting a strength that has its limits, that

might collapse, that might actually turn out to be rather fragile,

and yet, what the film shows is that when things do start collapsing

around these characters, she does have a kind of strength

that the Bob Hoskins character doesn't have.

And you suddenly see that this is really

a kind of maternal relationship,

so she IS powerful,

and yet the power really has its limits.

It's a film of its time.

They're fighting a new, unseen enemy,

more dangerous than class division or the mob.

Right the end of the film, you see, the last shot you see of her

in The Long Good Friday, is of her being kidnapped.

Hold up, where's my Tori?

All of this front has broken down, it's all gone.

There she is, disappearing from us and from Bob Hoskins,

with a look of absolute terror on her face.

Terrorism is the threat overtaking the mob in Long Good Friday.

The film had allowed Helen to play Shakespearean complexity

in a very contemporary tragedy.

Northern Ireland, even with its troubles,

would be an important theme in her life...

..largely through her relationship with the actor Liam Neeson.

They met on the set of Excalibur.

Although Helen had been gaining critical acclaim,

she was never afraid of a fantasy role.

But a tiny, potentially controversial Irish movie

was about to put Helen's career into high gear.

Cal, a small budget film set amid the troubles of Northern Ireland

had a new director and a new young star.

Its writer couldn't believe their luck

in attracting Helen to an audition.

We watched these three clips,

and the first of them was John Lynch as the 19-year-old boy,

and Helen Mirren as the more mature woman,

and they were electric together, because here was John Lynch,

sitting on a sofa in this little scene that they had chosen,

sitting on a sofa beside Helen Mirren,

who was an eminent Shakespearean actress with a wonderful

reputation, and he had to make a pass at her and kiss her.

We used to cry at that.

We thought the mother should have been made the saint.

And you could just hear the nerves in his voice,

and for that particular scene,

it was like the nerves just before you make a pass or try

and kiss someone, and this stuck in his throat,

and it was just wonderful, and she responded beautifully to it.

There was no doubt in my mind

and in everybody else's mind as to the casting was perfect.

No. No, Cal.

-No, we can't.

-Why not?

-Oh, be sensible!

I did it because it was a story about Northern Ireland,

and I've spent quite a lot of time in the past few years

in Northern Ireland, and I did it because it was a wonderful script.

Is she new in there?

That's Marcella.

You know that police fella got shot last year?

No luck with a mixed marriage.

She's one of ours, you know.

Yes, I think I'm much more like Marcella, actually,

than anything else that I'm supposed to be.

'I think that I'm pretty introverted and quiet and serious.'

Oh, hello.

There's a wonderful intensity, and she just draws you into the role.

It ceases to be a role, and that's what good acting is.

That's the person, that's Marcella.

That's this woman who is as trapped in her own family as the boy

is trapped in the violent organisation, so the two of them are

trying to change their situation, and she was just wonderful.

I had to get out of that house.

That coughing.

I'd have made a terrible nurse.

Oh, God help me. It would have been better if you'd died.

Can I help?

No.

I'm very callous, you know. I'm only crying for myself.

They're not my responsibility. I just want to get out of there.

She got the accent absolutely right, and I remember, one day,

one of the times that I was on the set,

which was a farm in the south of Ireland,

and I came along and she was walking along this field,

and she was listening to a Walkman, which rather dates the story,

but she was listening, and I said, "Hello, Helen,"

and we had some chat, and I said, "What are you listening to?",

thinking it might be Beethoven or Bach or something like that,

and she said, "I'm listening to Liam Neeson saying my lines,"

So Liam Neeson, with his Northern Ireland accent,

was pitch perfect,

and she had recorded them, and she got them pitch perfect.

CRASH

What are you doing here?

I work here!

Get him out!

Get him out!

Cal is a love story set in the context

of the terrorism in Northern Ireland,

a subject so sensitive,

the film had to be shot south of the border in Dublin.

Hands up there, Paddy.

Oh, but I know him.

He says he works here, Miss.

Yes, yes, that's right. He does.

No, it's OK. Yes, we know him.

It's a heartbreaking story that reached international common ground,

leading to a screening at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival.

The amazing thing was that when the film was over, the audience,

French, or the world audience kind of stood up and applauded

for about six minutes, and I didn't know whether this was good or not.

I thought maybe it should be 12 minutes, but people tell me, yeah,

this is very good, and normally, or people have been known to walk out.

I want to tell you.

But I can't.

Remember that.

Remember that.

Helen Mirren won the Cannes Best Actress Award for Cal in 1984.

It was a landmark moment,

but the standing ovation didn't change her career overnight.

It doesn't make any difference at all in America.

And awards don't really, they're not...

Awards don't help you get work.

Awards make you feel good about work you've done,

but anything in the future is always full of chance and jeopardy.

Cal had given Helen international recognition,

but no big-screen breakthrough.

She could still be found in low-budget films

like Heavenly Pursuits with Tom Conti,

and the poorly-received Mosquito Coast with Harrison Ford.

She seemed happier on the stage,

and with the challenging experimental side of British cinema.

Films like the controversial

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover.

Georgie's naughty bits are nicely related, aren't they, Georgie?

Especially when she's paying me attention. Georgie?

I think The Cook, the Thief, his Wife, her Lover

was a big deal when it came out in the late '80s,

because of the strength of it, the violence, the sex in it,

but also, it was a weird mix,

because it looked like some sort of Renaissance painting,

it was very stately, yet at the same time, was really intense

and tough, so it was a very odd combination

that really worked, and a great performance from her.

Certainly, in the '80s, when she was playing

these disgruntled wife characters, that was the most extreme.

Georgie wouldn't joke about it, would you, Georgie?

You're a credit to women.

You could show these young women a thing or two nowadays.

You could teach these young men a thing or two, eh?

She is actually much stronger than that, and wants to break away from

that, and of course, that's what she's doing in that movie, you know.

She can't handle being the subservient wife,

and she wants to break free and have a relationship with someone

who really likes her, so I think the sexuality in that film

is all tied up to this very disgruntled character.

A character who feels suffocated.

As well as sex scenes, the film features murder and cannibalism,

all set in highly stylised tableaux.

It's pure arthouse, but just as we might have thought Helen Mirren

would stay on the fringes of mainstream screens, she was about

to give a performance that is etched in British television history.

PHONE RINGS

It's 1991.

The traditional mould of television crime dramas

is about to be shattered.

Come in.

Hello, Jane.

Did you get anything at Marlow's flat, ma'am?

Just a lot of flak from his girlfriend.

Where the hell is Sgt Otley?

Oh, yeah. Records sent this in. It's about Moira Henson.

She was picked up for soliciting 15 years ago.

I don't know if that's any use.

She's been on the dole for four years.

Could be interesting.

We've got 24 statements, and there's more waiting downstairs.

What do you want to do?

Er...

Super's with Marlow's lawyer.

You going to charge him?

I didn't know how good it was going to be, because you never know.

It's a script, I knew it was a good script, I knew it was a great role...

..and I was gagging to play it.

And formal identification of the victim is on my desk.

Her name is...

Karen Howard. We know.

I've got her boyfriend and her flatmates waiting upstairs.

Extension 242, please. Press office.

Right, well, I'll interview the boyfriend first, then.

It was a stonking great part.

It was one of the very, very rare, at that time,

very few dramas where you truly had a woman as the centrepiece,

you know, the proactive person in the drama.

Prime Suspect captured the attention of the nation.

It was a gripping crime thriller.

Look, I'm not going to harp on about this,

but I really appreciate you backing me up.

Boss...

But it was also about a woman clawing her way into a male world.

I think this is it.

I think we've got him on the run.

Thank you.

All right, let's go for it.

Yes, she used a regular...

Prime Suspect brought her to a mass TV audience,

something that actually, for a long time,

she said she'd never have anything to do with.

In the mid-'70s, she said,

"I'd rather be a hairdresser than do a television series."

Well, thankfully, she didn't stick to that promise,

but I think what Prime Suspect shows is her in her maturity,

and she's playing this character who is very problematic

and not immediately likeable.

In fact, not really very likeable at all, in many ways,

and I think this is absolutely the key to her acting.

Helen Mirren never wants to be liked.

She never asks for the indulgence of the audience.

She's always quite willing to keep quite a lot back or give

the sense that there is some rather sharp, dark life going on

under the surface of this character.

They backed you 100%. Refused to have Hicock take over.

That was on my desk when I came in.

Every single man signed it.

Did you know about it?

Erm...

No, no, I didn't.

Things have taken quite a turn, haven't they?

You were lucky.

Luck had nothing to do with it.

The lads worked really hard.

Bring me all the new information as soon as possible.

Of course, sir.

Helen's portrayal of DCI Jane Tennison was no invention.

She based the character on real women police officers.

Don't cry. Never cry.

If you're going to cry, go in the lavatory

and cry out of sight of people.

She said, "You will cry," you know, if you were actually a policeman,

you do cry, but you never cry in front of people.

Prime Suspect was one of the first of those tough character studies

of someone in the police.

We went on to have things like Cracker and endless police dramas,

we still have loads of them, where the main character has flaws,

where the main character has issues,

and we are as interested in them as a character

as we are in trying to solve the crime.

It's not just about trying to find out whodunnit,

there's also a psychological element to it, as well.

He's got the key in the lock.

He's opening up.

He's in.

Go! Go!

And the fact that she was a woman doing that

was incredibly groundbreaking.

There just hadn't been that kind of study before of that

kind of a character, and of course, it wasn't just over and done with

in one episode. This was a series, where each episode, you learnt more

and more about her, so I think the intensity of it was something

that was really new at the time.

I agree to a ten minute break.

You will not be allowed to make any telephone calls or see your wife

until this interview is terminated.

I will arrange for Miss Henson to call your mother.

No, they don't get on! I don't want Moira talking to my mother!

This is a mess, isn't it?

All right.

I did it.

Suddenly, Helen Mirren was a household name.

Oh, good morning, ma'am.

Is Superintendent Thorndyke in?

He left about an hour ago, ma'am.

I've put the case files on your desk.

Will there be anything else?

No, that's all, thanks.

A second series followed.

Then another. And another.

By series four, Jane Tennison had been promoted

to Detective Superintendent.

Now the struggle for authority

in the male-dominated police force was behind her.

This time she faced an inner tension as a woman with maternal instincts

leading the search for a lost child.

So she's got an amazing ability to be at once totally inside

what she's doing, and also be able to stand outside it.

If it turns into a murder investigation,

I can let you have another six men.

And what are they supposed to be? Pallbearers?

Jane, you know as well as I do, this kid is probably dead already.

No, no, I do not know that.

I need more detectives, Mike.

I need more uniforms. Vicky needs them.

I'm sorry.

Jesus, Mike.

You can't spare six officers to save a child's life,

but you can spare them to find her killer.

Go home, get some sleep.

There's something of a warrior about her, and Jane Tennison is somebody

who pursues what she believes, in spite of enormous personal cost,

which is what makes the character so incredibly compelling.

She'd come in exhausted one morning, and said,

"I haven't a clue about what to do in this scene.

"Just tell me and I'll do it."

And it was some incredibly emotional circumstance,

and she simply snapped to and did it.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

Sssh.

-I'm sorry.

-Sssh.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

Prime Suspect was the perfect combination of character and plot.

People spoke about in the streets

and planned their evenings to catch each episode.

And, unlike previous British police dramas,

it taught the Americans a thing or two.

American television has a tendency to see something it likes abroad,

buy the template and bring it over.

It was interesting with Prime Suspect, where they did, in fact,

make their own American Prime Suspect, with Maria Bellow,

was very, very good, but they also brought over the original,

and I think that that speaks volumes to the attraction of Helen Mirren.

I think, with somebody else in the leading role,

they may not have done that.

In 1996, Helen took time out.

It was 2003 before she was persuaded back.

She made two final outings to see the end of Tennison's career.

In The Final Act in 2006, time, the job,

and the illness of her father have pushed her close to the edge.

She's to be retired after one last investigation.

Sometimes she is associated with being very glamorous, but she's more

than prepared to look unglamorous, especially as Tennison, you know.

She would sink to a lot of low levels with the character's drinking

problems, and Helen never had a problem about just appearing

with no make-up or looking slightly rough, very rough, at times.

Vanessa. Vanessa Flint.

She tried to look after Curtis when the mother died.

What number is it?

I'm sorry...

I'll need to speak to Penny later, OK?

His sister's there.

Hmmm?

A little girl.

For a new intake of actors, joining the legend that Prime Suspect

had become was both daunting and a special opportunity.

You know, when the phone call came through to my agent,

would I be interested in playing a part, they didn't tell me

what the part was like, in the last ever Prime Suspect, I just said yes.

They said, "Don't you want to know what the part's about?" "No."

Can I say something?

I did it.

Sally.

It's just the chance to work with one of the best

actors that the country has ever produced.

So your only alibi for that night is Penny?

I don't want Penny dragged into this...

Sean, Sean. Penny has already been dragged into it.

She's been questioned, her bedroom has been searched,

and yet you cling onto her statement.

Penny's trying to do the right thing.

Well, of course she is, she's only a child, isn't she?

I mean, how old is she? Oh, she's the same age as little Sally.

For Helen, it was a personal journey,

and the coming to an end of a character that she created,

so I think everyone was duly reverential to her,

but she's an amazing character on set.

She certainly leads from the front.

Let Penny free of this.

No!

I've let everyone down.

The whole school, everyone.

But I didn't kill Sally.

I couldn't.

It's probably the role that she'll be most remembered for,

especially from a British television watching audience,

because it ran for so many years,

and the attitudes to a female officer differed over the years,

and I think she was probably responsible for that, as well,

in highlighting the difficulties for women,

in the way that she and her character

walked away from it at the end.

It was a beautiful shot, and I was thrilled to have been a part of it.

For 15 years, Helen Mirren's name

had been synonymous with Jane Tennison and Prime Suspect.

But she had worried about being typecast,

and continued to appear in a string of stage and film productions,

including Emmy-winning The Passion Of Ayn Rand

and Last Orders with Michael Caine and Bob Hoskins.

In Gosford Park, she disappears into an ensemble cast as the housekeeper,

albeit with Jane Tennison's steely authority.

She has Tennison's sense of justice,

but this time she's the quiet killer who gets away with it.

Just leave everything round the corner, there,

make sure it's properly labelled. It'll go up in the luggage lift.

These are the guns. Where's the gun room?

On the right. You'll find Mr Strutt, the keeper, in there.

He'll show you what to do.

I know what to do.

That seemed to me to be a classic Mirren performance,

because there is this kind of hardness about it.

She's in this relatively authoritative position

below stairs in this great household.

I can't tell Mrs Croft. I simply don't dare.

Oh, everything is under control, Your Ladyship.

Mr Weissman's valet informed us as soon as he arrived,

so we've prepared a special version of the soup.

He can eat the fish and the hors d'oeuvres.

And we'll have a Welsh rabbit for the game course.

I don't know what we'll do about the entree,

but we'll think of something.

But she somehow wears the stresses and strains of all of this.

She's not one of those actors who's sort of impervious to things.

You can see that life has had an effect upon her.

Now, now, Mrs Croft, we don't want to be thought unsophisticated,

do we?

Mr Weissman's an American. They do things differently there.

She'll never play an innocent.

She'll always play people to whom a lot of things have happened,

and who have done a lot of things, too,

so she brings the weight of all that

to everything she does.

I'm afraid smoking isn't allowed up here.

Well, I hope you're finding everything

to make His Lordship's stay more comfortable.

I hope we haven't forgotten anything.

I can't believe you forget much, Mrs Wilson.

No, not much.

Well, I'll leave you to your book.

What was interesting about Gosford Park, I think,

in terms of Helen Mirren, was that she played a servant in that film.

The movie was about the differences between the servants

and the aristocracy,

so in the aristocracy you had Kristin Scott Thomas,

you had Maggie Smith, very respected actresses of a similar ilk to

Helen Mirren, but she didn't play one of the posh people.

She played one of the servants, and I think that kind of sums her up.

Of course, she'd go on to play the most famous

aristocrat in the world, the Queen, but I think at that point,

even though she had a great career behind her, very respected,

she was still a bit too dangerous to be playing the posh aristocrat.

She had to be the working-class person,

the person who had a bit more of an edge to her.

What are you doing?

Dorothy, get back to work.

Excuse me, but Dorothy's under my jurisdiction as well, you know.

And I say she can listen to a spot of music if she likes.

Gosford Park caught the imagination of audiences around the world,

who marvelled at its portrayal of honour in the British class system.

You know, Maggie Smith, you can't imagine playing a maid.

She will always be the grand dame, but I think Helen has this

rebellious streak to her that just wouldn't fit the posh older lady.

She needed to be a bit more edgy.

Why did you do it?

How did you know it was him?

Was it the name, or did you see the photograph in his room?

Ah, yes, the photograph.

It's a miracle that survived.

I remember his mother putting it into his blanket.

I suppose she wanted him to have something of hers.

Does he know what happened to her?

They said she died just after he was born.

Well, she didn't die. She gave him away.

He promised the boy would be adopted. He said he knew the family.

Turns out we all clung to that dream.

All us girls.

Better start in life for our children.

All the time, he was dumping them,

his own children, in some godforsaken place.

And I believed him.

In 2003, Hollywood producers were again fascinated

by the peculiarities of English life.

They had found the true story of a prim and proper Women's Institute

who produced their own nude calendar for charity.

Helen was a natural choice as ringleader.

Ted, would you mind if I borrowed this?

Aye.

Helen Mirren in the WI? You can't imagine that, so she played

the WI character who actually took the mick out of being in the WI.

The others were traditional types, but she was the one who was the real rebel.

And it's for John, and it's because of John, and no matter what

might think of the idea, Marie,

you're looking at January.

February.

March.

BOTH: April!

Calendar Girls grossed 96 million.

Helen Mirren earned a Golden Globe Award as best actress,

and there was a thumbs up from the real women they portrayed.

Never for one moment did I think,

"Oh, I don't like that, that's not right." All of it was just perfect.

Brilliant.

Off...

Off...

Off...

Off...

Off...

Off...!

Helen was a national treasure.

In 2003, she was elevated to the lofty office of

Dame Commander of the British Empire,

as near a crown as is allowed in the acting profession.

She already had a track record in playing historic royalty.

From Cleopatra to Queen Charlotte in The Madness Of King George,

and Elizabeth I in a spectacular Channel 4 series.

Now, in 2006, it was time to have a go

at the current incumbent on the throne.

It's the Princess of Wales.

Why? What's she done now?

She had shown that she could do things that were a little bit

more sedate, I suppose, with Gosford Park,

and got an Oscar nomination for that,

but with The Queen, I mean, she was playing the most traditional person

in the country, and that was a big deal.

They could have gone for someone safer.

It was a risk, I think, casting Helen Mirren, because we associated

her with being sexy and a bit rebellious and a bit tough,

but actually, bringing those qualities to the character

of the Queen was really interesting,

and we saw her as someone who was much tougher, I think,

than we ever had imagined before.

Playing living characters placed extra demands on the cast.

They needed to be actors, and mimics, with realistic

impersonations of the well-known royal mannerisms.

Well, I remember when she was about to do The Queen, I remember

seeing her interviewed, and in her very particular way,

she was talking very seriously about how the Queen has a very

particular focus, and a very particular way of being.

And I remember thinking, "Oh, come on, love, you know.

"Put on the wig and the funny glasses and you're there."

Charles and I had a talk in the car today.

He was good enough to share with me his thoughts on motherhood.

What did he say?

How wonderful Diana was.

She didn't go over the top with the impression.

There was an element of impersonation to it,

but she resisted temptation to really ham one up.

And she played it so sensitively.

Even when she's saying nothing, she still embodies

the characterisation of the Queen, and it is so wonderful to see.

She's so in it, and there's just this silence

and this stillness, but there's a close-up on her face, and

you can see all of her thoughts, you can see it all going on in there.

When you're playing a sustained role in a drama,

you have to do a lot more than just look at those outward signifiers.

You have to try and imagine how that character feels from the inside,

and that's what she did. She humanised the Queen.

I see Mr Fayed was buried last night.

At midnight. No fuss, no cameras.

Very dignified.

Why do they do that? Why do they bury the body so soon after death?

Islamic tradition.

Something to do with the heat.

Mmm.

You become something. You don't think about acting.

I was the Queen Mother, and that was my daughter.

He wanted to know whether we should make any changes in the service,

any special mention of Diana.

What did you say?

I told him not to change a thing.

Quite right.

I think the less attention one draws to it, the better, for the boys.

With some people, and Helen is one of them,

you get that feeling very quickly,

so we might be joking in the make-up room,

but once we were together, you felt,

just from the look in the eyes, that there was something very real there.

Thank you, Robin. I'll take it in the study.

It's the story behind the headlines

after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.

The Royal family is in shock, and struggles to find comfort

in the traditions of the throne, when everything is changing.

Prime Minister?

May I say, right away, how very sorry I am,

and the thoughts and prayers of my family

are with you at this terrible time.

And with the princes, in particular.

Thank you.

Is it your intention to make some kind of appearance?

Or statement?

No, no, certainly not.

No member of the Royal family will speak publicly about this.

This is private...

Maybe it's when the Americans really noticed Helen.

She'd been a huge success on television over here, we know,

with Prime Suspect.

But maybe that was...

Anyway, it's a remarkable performance.

It's a very detailed performance,

and above all,

you never think for a second somebody is acting.

Would you like me to place those for you?

No.

Oh.

These are for you.

For me?

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

That's a performance of tremendous integrity.

The Queen is the thing that, because it wins her the Oscar,

it really makes her in that kind of stratospheric level of stardom,

where she can more or less do what she wants.

I'm very glad that Helen won the Oscar for The Queen.

To start with, she wasn't playing a young girl.

She kept her clothes on all the time.

She didn't rant or scream.

She played a serious part and convinced people.

And since then, she's gone from one part to another,

all slightly different.

The Queen also won Helen the ultimate British accolade.

With two huge screen personas,

she started to have the mickey taken out of her on TV.

Ladies and gentlemen, I'm not just thrilled,

I'm genuinely thrilled to be graced with this Oscar.

I don't think it's an exaggeration

to say that I prepared for this role for more than 400 years.

"Particular" is a very Helen Mirren word.

Her particular focus, her particular quality

is a combination of power and vulnerability.

I struggled endlessly to capture the Queen's very particular focus.

And I think there are a lot of actresses who can play vulnerable,

and a lot of actresses who can play powerful, but I think

what Dame Helen has is the ability to show them both coexisting.

Good evening.

One can't have failed to notice the hoopla surrounding

Dame Helen Mirren's Oscar-nominated performance in the film Me.

Well, Mirren, if you're going to have a piece of my turf,

then I'm damn well going to have a piece of yours.

So, what have we got?

Ma'am, her name's Sally Richards, 19-year-old.

The body was discovered by a jogger out for an early morning run.

One better talk to the parents.

We really appreciate you doing this.

Nonsense. It's no trouble at all.

I now declare this murder investigation officially open.

The Hollywood hotline has been busy in recent years

with offers of big films with big names.

National Treasure, with Nicolas Cage.

Red with Bruce Willis and Morgan Freeman.

But Helen has kept an eye for the controversial,

playing a brothel madam in Love Ranch.

Then there was the high concept,

playing Prospera in a film of The Tempest, normally a male role.

From Hollywood frolics to Shakespeare,

and by way of cultural contrast, a touch of Russian melodrama.

Helen plays Tolstoy's wife in The Last Station.

It was a role she took to with passion. She's half Russian.

Oh, please, call me Sofya Andreyevna.

We don't stand on formality here, as you may have noticed.

Helen's real name is Mironov.

Her Russian father married an Englishwoman.

Her grandfather, Colonel Pyotr Vasilievich Mironov,

was in the Tsarist Army and later became a diplomat,

becoming stranded in Britain during the Russian Revolution.

Interesting, you know, whether her Russian heritage

affected her choice.

It was a very, very good part,

you know, the put-upon wife,

who was also a bit of a piece of work, you know.

Knowing all the time full well that Count Generosity here

is about to give away everything we own.

Now why do you keep going on about this?

Why do you think that we should profit from the work I'm doing now,

which is only meant for the sake of the people?

Stop writing!

Stop writing now!

I'll tell you what's interesting about Helen,

and this is just my thought, is that she's a man's girl.

She doesn't like hanging with the girls too much, I don't think.

She gets on fine with them,

but I think she's happier in male company.

Which gives her a distinctive type of femininity, I think.

Then go! Go wherever you please!

Go anywhere you please!

I hate you!

I hate what you've become!

Dusan!

And I play Tolstoy's doctor, so I had to try and revive her,

and of course, in so doing, I was holding her by the waist,

you know, and Helen was writhing around.

I thought, "God, you are one sexy woman!"

Oh, my back!

You're lying on a fork.

Sit up and you'll improve markedly.

Helen Mirren has been creating headlines for more than 40 years.

She's won a stack of awards,

and appeared in everything from Shakespeare to the risque,

from historical drama to action thriller.

She's never afraid to take on something different,

even when that involves a downright unglamorous

savage physical tussle, as she does in The Debt.

And there was no question of making The Debt at all

if Helen couldn't do it, in my mind.

I mean, there was just no point in starting the film.

She was the reason the film got made,

and the reason we made the film, if you see what I mean,

because I couldn't think of any other actor

who could embody that tension

in such a fierce and visceral way.

Did you know he'd been ill?

You did, didn't you? You knew he'd been ill!

There aren't many actresses who could convey

that in the way that she is able to do.

I mean, famously, she has this raw power and strength.

She has a kind of ferocity as an actress, but to me,

it's this quality she has of being able to make the interior manifest

is what's so amazing about her,

and she does this through

an amazing mastery of technique.

Helen is hunting the Surgeon of Birkenau,

a fugitive Nazi war criminal.

The public thinks she assassinated some 30 years ago, but he survived.

Now he's been tracked down by a newspaper,

and she's faced with silencing the old man once and for all.

You know, she's completely relaxed about what she's doing now.

She doesn't come into the room with any tension,

she's cracking jokes before the camera turns over,

and then when the camera turns over,

there's suddenly this incredible kind of tension evident.

Why did you come?

Why did you have to come?

I said Schevchuk.

I know I shouldn't have talked to him.

The challenge of that sequence is that it was

a fight between two very old people.

I say very old, Helen's character is in her 60s,

and her adversary a little older than that,

and so the challenge was actually

to render a fight that was believable,

so that any expenditure of effort was almost inevitably

succeeded by somebody sitting down to get their breath back.

She was absolutely unperturbed by that.

She wanted the character to look the age that she is.

It's not exactly a heroic fight,

but an immensely galling and visceral fight.

Dame Helen is a Hollywood star,

but she's not above a season on the stage,

taking a live portrayal of The Queen to London's West End.

Her performances bring new insights

to real historical characters,

like Alma, Alfred Hitchcock's wife.

Actually, I think it's a huge mistake.

You shouldn't wait till halfway through.

Kill her off after 30 minutes.

Wow.

Dame Helen continues to surprise and shock, even in her mature years.

Strong, sexy, ageless, powerful.

From a young age to the age she is now, she's never had a period

where she hasn't excelled at whatever role she's attempted.

Luck had nothing to do with it.

She is an incredibly fit actor, you know, in all senses of that word.

She is, you know, physically, has incredible stamina

and incredible strength, so there's absolutely no question that

she'll go on, you know taking on very, very challenging roles.

A fearless rebel from the '60s, she is as likely

to surprise and shock audiences even now, in her mature years.

I think she's one of the greatest actors that we have,

but she's not one of those people who is going to be somehow

slightly ossified by the fact that she's been given these honours.

For someone who is a Dame, for someone who is so accepted,

who is so part of the furniture, really, everybody knows her,

I think to still be a bit of a rebel and to still surprise us

is really exciting.

Stop writing!

Stop writing now!

I'm longing to see her when she plays old ladies like me.

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