For the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Chaplin Award Gala, “Film Comment” has posted quite a few very interesting and in-depth articles on Helen, including an interview and this main piece entitled “Noblesse Oblige”. An excerpt can be read on the Lincoln Center’s website: “I’m not the bloody Queen,” Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison scolds her abashed male driver for addressing her as “Ma’am” instead of her preferred “Guv.” Tennison may not play royalty in the hit British television crime series Prime Suspect, though she does rule there as a queen bee. But over a long career on stage and screens large and small, Helen Mirren, who plays the spiky policewoman, has enacted a raft of bloody Queens, one of whom won her a richly deserved Oscar and swelled her already solid cachet with royalty-loving American audiences. From her early days in Britain’s National Youth Theater, where her Cleopatra attracted agents’ attention, Mirren has propped up a cottage industry of royals wielding power, libido, and bags of lavishly costumed panache. She played the fourth and, mercifully, final wife of Malcolm McDowell in the ill-starred Caligula (1979). Bewigged and brocaded, she appeared opposite Nigel Hawthorne as Queen Charlotte, the devoted 18th-century consort who tried to keep her demented husband on the throne in The Madness of King George (1994). She drew rave notices for her Elizabeth I in the television miniseries of the same name, and as Elizabeth II in Peter Morgan’s 2013 stage play The Audience, which imagines the weekly conversations between Her Royal Majesty and a fleet of Prime Ministers, all of whom she outlasted. And lest you think she’s done playing monarchs, Mirren is prepping to star as Catherine the Great in an upcoming HBO/Sky miniseries. That’s a pretty pedigreed franchise for an actress who has played more than her share of gangster’s molls, and even there she oozed her own brand of tarnished nobility.
Read posts from the archive:
December 9th, 2019
July 13th, 2023
November 26th, 2021
