Thank you for letting me burble on about my career,” Helen Mirren laughs self-deprecatingly, after looking back on her glittering body of work in the latest instalment of our video series, How I Got Here. Of course, the pleasure is all ours. As one of the most lauded, critically acclaimed and celebrated British actresses of the last century, her fans and peers alike remain fascinated and in awe of her five-decade long career spanning film, theatre and television. This was evident just recently at the 2022 Screen Actors Guild awards in February, at which Mirren was given the Life Achievement Award – voted for by her fellow actors – presented to her by Cate Blanchett and Kate Winslet. Mirren was inspired to become an actress after watching a local production of Hamlet as a teenager. “I’m sure the production was terrible, but Shakespeare, the story of Hamlet… it was a thriller to me,” she tells us. “I went back home and we had this huge book of Shakespeare. I went through it looking for characters I responded to. That was what led me into wanting to become an actress.” The complete interview and video can be watched over at Harper’s Bazaar.
Read posts from the archive:
March 19th, 2024
February 27th, 2023
November 8th, 2019
