The Observer
Focus 09.01.22 35would pay off fi rst. It did. As a ris-
ing star at the Royal Shakespeare
Company in the 60s, Mirren played
Lady Macbeth in 1974 and was duly
dubbed Sex Queen of Stratford.
Her often provocative fi lm career
kicked off in 1969 with The Age of
Consent , in which she was the young
object of desire for James Mason.
But the long path to stardom she
has since followed was far from
certain. “When I started acting I felt
like I didn’t fi t in to the Zeitgeist of
British theatrical culture,” she has
said. “I wasn’t an ‘English Rosey’
sort of person.”
Last week Mirren kept her own
counsel on the Jewface dispute, but
it is an issue that soon took some
illuminating turns. Speaking on BBC
Radio 4 on Friday, David Baddiel
and Lipman examined the case and
largely concurred. “Actors should be
allowed to act,” said Baddiel, “But if
there is now outrage about casting
against type, then why is there no
outrage when it comes to Jews?”
The writer and comedian went on to
point out a string of recent examples
of casting non-Jewish actors in sub-
stantial Jewish roles, including Ruth
Bader Ginsburg and Joan Rivers.
Praising Mirren and predicting a
“fi ne” performance as Meir, Lipman
added that she also is opposed to
the kind of “narrow casting” that
would see parts matched up closely
to an actor’s background and so
prevent Benedict Cumberbatch
playing a cowboy. Dame Maureen
argued, nevertheless, that a Jewish
actor should have been considered
fi rst and that a Jewish audience
will recognise the difference. “Hilda
Schwarzkopf from Hendon will
know,” she said. The putative Mrs
Schwarzkopf has yet to comment.
It will not be the fi rst leading
Jewish role Mirren has played. In
Woman in Gold , she was Maria
Altmann , niece of the muse of
Viennese painter Gustav Klimt.
Altmann’s aunt, Adele Bloch-Bauer,
had been the model for a famous
1907 portrait seized by a Nazi col-
lector. In 2006, after a long legal
case, the Klimt was returned to the
family by the Austrian state andedges of acceptability, or perhaps
to sheer naughtiness. You might
have seen her on screen in Lindsay
Anderson’s O Lucky Man! Or in the
louche 1980 fi lm Caligula. Before
Prime Suspect’s Jane Tennison
marched on to small screens in
1992, Mirren was probably still best
known as Bob Hoskins’ uninhibited
paramour in The Long Good Friday, a
part she played when she was 35.
But at 44 she starred in Peter
Greenaway ’s The Cook, the Thief, His
Wife & Her Lover , involving intimate
scenes in a ladies’ loo. Then at 61
she played her fi rst Queen Elizabeth,
the Tudor one, in an HBO minise-
ries that got her properly noticed in
America.
Her time as the current Queen,
before it became normal for British
actors to play Elizabeth II, came with
the Stephen Frears fi lm The Queen,
which won her an Oscar in 2006.
The actor does not like to repeat
herself and has recounted a violent
initial reaction to screenwriter Peter
Morgan ’s invitation to return to the
part of Elizabeth on stage in his play
The Audience. “You bastard!” she
recalled thinking, claiming Morgan
had calculated she would not be
able to resist. “How could I? And yet
at the same time you don’t want to
go backward; you really don’t want
to be a one-trick pony .” She won an
Olivier for her portrayal.
Before Mirren met her husband,
director Taylor Hackford , 35 years
ago on the set of his 1985 fi lm White
Nights , her boyfriends were suitably
glamorous. The Russian emigre
Prince George Galitzine was on her
arm in the 1970s and for a while in
the 1980s she lived with “my darling
Liam Neeson”.
It was he who Mirren said listened
when she felt early pangs about age-
ing: “I remember getting very drunk
and just sobbing because he was
eight years younger than me: ‘It’s
all over. It’s all very well for you, my
career is about to come to an end
and nobody will employ me again .’”
Neeson, apparently, was “com-
pletely unsympathetic”, merely
replying, “Ach, shut up.” Today it is
evident just how right he was.was sold for £73m. Altmann, who
died ten years ago, donated money
to arts institutions and Holocaust
survivors’ groups. “It was justice,”
Mirren said at the time.
Not usually shy of expressing her
views, Mirren has called for change
in Hollywood, championing the
career of black directors and publicly
objecting to the surfeit of violence
towards women on screen. In 2010
she ticked off an assembled group
of Hollywood women, many of them
powerful executives, for making
fi lms that chiefl y served “the 18 to
25-year-old male and his penis”.H
appily, things have
improved a little
for women in the
industry since the
TV appearance
Mirren infamously
made at the age of 30 on Parkinson.
The chat show host harped on about
her physical attributes in a way that
she now considers “outrageous”. “I
was terrifi ed. I watched it and I actu-
ally thought, bloody hell! I did really
well. I was so young and inexperi-
enced. And he was such a fucking
sexist old fart.”
Professionally Mirren has herself
been accused of being drawn to the‘ I didn’t fi t into the
Zeitgeist of British
theatrical culture as
I wasn’t an English
Rosey sort of person’
Helen Mirren
ABOVE
Playing
Elizabeth II in
the 2006 fi lm
The Queen.
Granada Film/
AllstarRIGHT
Mirren as
Israel’s fi rst
female prime
minster, Golda
Meir, inset.
PAHelen Mirren at
the Cannes fi lm
festival last year.
Corbis/Getty