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Dame Helen Mirren DBE (born Helen Lydia Mironoff, [4] 26 July 1945) is an English actor. With a career spanning 60 years, she is the recipient of numerous accolades and is the only performer to have achieved both the American and the British Triple Crowns of Acting.
- Overview
- Early life and stage career
- The Madness of King George, Gosford Park, and The Queen
- Later films
- Television work and Broadway
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.
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).
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.
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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.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Jan 7, 2024 · Dame Helen Mirren is an Oscar-winning actor known for her roles in ‘The Queen’ and ‘Hitchcock.’ She is nominated for a 2024 Golden Globe Award.
- editor@biography.com
- Staff Editorial Team And Contributors
Dec 14, 2022 · As Helen Mirren's fame began to grow, she developed a reputation for playing hypersexualized roles, beginning with the 1969 film "Age of Consent," a film filled with nudity in which the 24-year-old Mirren starred opposite 60-year-old James Mason (via Everything Zoomer).
Helen Mirren. Actress: The Queen. Dame Helen Mirren was born in Queen Charlotte's Hospital in West London. Her mother, Kathleen Alexandrina Eva Matilda (Rogers), was from a working-class English family, and her father, Vasiliy Petrovich Mironov, was a Russian-born civil servant, from Kuryanovo, whose own father was a diplomat.
- July 26, 1945
Helen Mirren is a famous English actress. She started her acting career on stage with the Royal Shakespeare Company and went on to become one of the most celebrated actresses on stage, film and television.
Mar 9, 2022 · The early years of Mirren's career were devoted to the stage, but that all changed when she was cast as the lead role of DCI Jane Tennison in the 1991 television series Prime Suspect.
