The Observer (2022-01-09)

The Observer
34 09.01.22 Focus

Helen Mirren

The dame who

does it all sparks

new controversy

She’s won plaudits

as the Queen and a

gangster’s moll but

her casting as the late

Israeli PM Golda Meir

has caused unease,

writes Vanessa Thorpe

N

obody is quite what

they seem. And

actors? Well, for

actors that’s the job.

Dame Helen Mirren ,

as well as being her-

self for 76 years, has by now notably

been Lady Macbeth, a London gang-

ster’s moll, a thief’s wife, an alco-

holic cop, an action hero, Prospero

and also a British monarch at least

four times. Now she takes on Golda

Meir , the late prime minister of

Israel, in a new biopic, and the cast-

ing has caused controversy.

The choice of a non-Jewish actor

to star as a woman with such a

prominent place in the history

of Israel has prompted irritation

on both sides of the argument.

Another illustrious dame , Maureen

Lipman , was fi rst to raise the issue

• or “blast” Mirren, according to
  some reports last week – and then
  Dame Esther Rantzen defended
  the director’s choice. It is the latest
  instance of a ‘Jewface’ row, a back-

lash to the assignment of a major

Jewish role to someone not from

that minority background.

But the list of things that Mirren

‘is not’ is long, and it does not

necessarily start with ‘not Jewish’.

For openers, she is not of English

descent. She was born Illiana

Lydia Petrovna Mironova into

emigre Russian aristocracy in

1945 in Chiswick. This means that

her Oscar-nominated role as Leo

Tolstoy’s wife Sofya in the 2009 fi lm

The Last Station may be the closest

to her own natural ‘type’. Certainly,

she is not the bun-baking, clothes-

shedding Yorkshire woman she

played in the 2003 hit Calendar Girls.

In fact, her great grandmother

was a White Russian countess and

her grandfather, Tsarist offi cer

Pyotr Vassili Mironov , was caught

in London, where he had been

negotiating an arms deal, after the

Bolshevik revolution and was per-

manently separated from his funds.

Mirren’s father was a taxi driver

and mother the 13th child of an East

End butcher. As a result the actor

sees her family as “Chekhovian ” dis-

placed gentry, rather than one of

Tolstoy’s elite. “I grew up in a mid-

dle-class family who were living in a

working-class economic situation,”

she has explained.

To please her father, Mirren went

to teaching college, but also won

a place with the National Youth

Theatre. Working at both, she

quietly hoped the stage training

LEFT

Mirren in

The Cook, the

Thief, His Wife

& Her Lover.

Ronald Grant

ABOVE

As Queen

Charlotte in

The Madness

of King George.

Channel Four/

Allstar

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that

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ainly,

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n

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per-

funds.

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n went

won

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BOVE

s Queen

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he Madness

King George.

hannel Four/

lstar

force to regain control because the
system no longer works for them.”
A year after the 6 January insur-
rection, the atmosphere on Capitol
Hill remains toxic amid a break-
down of civility, trust and shared
norms. Several Republican mem-
bers of Congress received menacing
messages, including a death threat,
after voting for an otherwise bipar-
tisan infrastructure bill that Trump
opposed.
The two Republicans on the
House of Representatives select
committee that is investigat-
ing the attack, Liz Cheney and
Adam Kinzinger, have faced calls
to be banished from their party.
Democrat Ilhan Omar of Minnesota,
a Somali-born Muslim, has suffered
Islamophobic abuse.
Yet Trump’s supporters argue
that they are the ones fi ght-
ing to save democracy. Last year
Congressman Madison Cawthorn
of North Carolina said: “If our elec-
tion systems continue to be rigged
and continue to be stolen, then it’s
going to lead to one place and that’s
bloodshed.”

L

ast month
Congresswoman
Marjorie Taylor Greene
of Georgia, who has
bemoaned the treat-
ment of 6 January
defendants who were jailed for their
role in the insurrection, called for
a “national divorce” between blue
and red states. Democrat Ruben
Gallego responded forcefully: “There
is no ‘ national divorce’. Either you
are for civil war or not. Just say it if
you want a civil war and offi cially
declare yourself a traitor.”
There is also the prospect of
Trump running for president again
in 2024. Republican-led states are
imposing voter restriction laws cal-
culated to favour the party while
Trump loyalists are seeking to take
charge of running elections. A dis-
puted White House race could make
for an incendiary cocktail.
James Hawdon, director of
the Center for Peace Studies and
Violence Prevention at Virginia Tech
university, said: “I don’t like to be an
alarmist, but the country has been
moving more and more towards
violence, not away from it. Another
contested election may have grim
consequences.”
Although most Americans have
grown up taking its stable democ-
racy for granted, this is also a soci-
ety where violence is the norm, not
the exception, from the genocide of
Native Americans to slavery, from
the civil war to four presidential
assassinations, from gun violence
that claims 40,000 lives each year
to a military industrial complex that
has killed millions overseas.
Larry Jacobs , director of the
Center for the Study of Politics and
Governance at the University of
Minnesota, said: “America is not
unaccustomed to violence. It is a
very violent society and what we’re
talking about is violence being given
an explicit political agenda. That’s a

Continued from page 33 kind of terrifying new direction in

America.”

While he does not currently fore-

see political violence becoming

endemic, Jacobs agrees that any

such unravelling would also be most

likely to resemble Northern Ireland’s

Troubles.

“We would see these episodic

scattered terrorist attacks,” Jacobs

added. “The Northern Ireland model

is the one that , frankly, most fear

because it doesn’t take a huge num-

ber of people to do this and right

now there are highly motivated,

well-armed groups. The question is,

has the FBI infi ltrated them suffi -

ciently to be able to knock them out

before they launch a campaign of

terror?

“Of course, it doesn’t help in

America that guns are prevalent.

Anyone can get a gun and you have

ready access to explosives. All of this

is kindling for the precarious posi-

tion we now fi nd ourselves in.”

Nothing, though, is inevitable.

Biden also used his speech to

praise the 2020 election as the

greatest demonstration of democ-

racy in US history with a record

150 million-plus people voting

despite the pandemic. Trump’s chal-

lenges to the election result were

thrown out by what remains a

robust court system and scrutinised

by what remains a vibrant civil soci-

ety and media.

In a reality check, Josh Kertzer,

a political scientist at Harvard

University, tweeted: “I know a lot of

civil war scholars, and ... very few of

them think that the United States is

on the precipice of a civil war.”

And yet the assumption that “it

can’t happen here” is as old as pol-

itics itself. Walter has interviewed

many survivors about the lead-up to

civil wars.

“What everybody said, whether

they were in Baghdad or Sarajevo or

Kiev, was we didn’t see it coming,”

she said. “In fact, we weren’t willing

to accept that anything was wrong

until we heard machine-gun fi re in

the hillside. And by that time, it was

too late.”

ON OTHER PAGES

Joe Biden one year on: how has

he done? Leading American writers

give their verdicts

New Review, pages 8-13

Biden is right to rage, but the only

antidote to Trump’s lies is US law

Observer Comment, page 40