The Observer (2022-01-09)

(EriveltonMoraes) #1

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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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
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