Helen Mirren is delivered to the public in two distinctly different packages. One is the critics’ darling who swept to youthful stardom in the more torrid roles – from a sensual Lady Macbeth opposite Nicol Williamson with the Royal Shakespeare Company, at Stratford, to the booze-ridden rock singer in the wildly acclaimed pop-culture drama. Teeth’n’Smiles. The other is the leading lady of the gossip writers, the bosomy night-girl over whom a prince und a fashion photographer exchanged blows at her home. Either image might be enviable; neither is right. But Miss Mirren has put in so many disclaimers on both counts to anyone who will listen that she’s more than weary of stating her case. For the moment she has deliberately bowed out of the limelight in each arena. She doesn’t answer the phone to journalists and she’s taking a rest from acting.

Her admirers from both camps will see her this month on their television screens as Rosalind in the BBC’s As You Like It – a role coveted by any actress eager to win her laurels in the hall of the greats. She is also playing in Dennis Potter’s Blue Remembered Hills, to be shown on BBC during December and January. But they’re already in the can, part of her immediate past as far as Miss Mirren is concerned. So is Caligula, the litigation-locked Gore Vidal movie she made in Rome with Peter O’Toole, Malcolm McDowell and Sir John Gielgud. To her delight there seems little chance of anyone seeing this for quite some time. She returned from Rome complaining that every scene she appeared in contained at least two naked couples doing strange things in odd corners and that she was constantly filmed next to outsized phallic symbols. Yet today she blesses it. She sends a little kiss up to heaven to the man whose money made it all possible before he went to meet his maker and the film’s release got bound up in law suits.

“I earned a lot of money doing Caligula. Pots and pots of money. For the first time in my life I carned enough not to have to worry about what to do next. Anyway, for a couple of months or so! I’m just packing to go away on holiday as a matter of fact.” she declares cheerfully across the old deal table in the dining bit of her tiny flat. And that’s where the first rip in the public packaging d who now occupies the top half very noisily. The only sig newly acquired affluence is the decorators’ scaffolding outsid in a pretty shade of powder pink trimmed with white and house stands out from its staid red-brick Edwardian wood blue. For the first time in her life she has deliberately stopped doing anything. “I’ve always gone from one thing knowing what going to do next,” she admits, “and I just felt it was time consider the situation. I don’t like the word career. I call it just work. Whatever it is, I think you get to a plateau. Perhaps I need to refind that feeling of being absolutely thrilled to do anything at all.

She wasn’t at all thrilled at first to be offered the role of Rosaling though perfectly aware of the honour being done to her. “Let’s face it, no one is going to mistake me for a boy, with a slightly sardonic glance down at the famous breasts. “Shakespeare wrote the part for a boy and it must have been fascinating to see that completet thing of a boy pretending to the a girl pretending to be a boy. But it doesn’t work that way now and as far as I’m concerned it never has. I know most actresses that they’ve got to do it. They all said, “Oh, so-and-so is giving her Rosalind”, and then you all go of and compare you to Vanessa Redgrave. But then, when they asked me to read this one speech, the one where she tells Orlando that he is in love, and that the real relationships should be about something on a different level. Then I feel what she is all about for me, it is the first time I really felt like I know the lady. Then I knew how she felt. She was a woman who knew all about love. I thought, “That’s it! Just what I’ve always felt about love.” She knows it’s not a beautiful airy thing at all. “You know, whenever I’m in love I’m physically sick. Really ill I go around throwing up all over the place, miserable as sin. Well, no one can spend their life doing that. You’ve got to work out something better.

Now her relationship with her parents is, in her own words. absolutely wonderful. “They have come to see me as a fully-fledged person and I have come to see them as two separate human beings. We discuss things on adult terms. I don’t think any relationship can work until you can do that.” The tattoo just by the thumb of her left hand is a symbol which at first she is reluctant to talk about. She had it applied in South America. But gradually she explains how it ties up with her view of life, its potential relationships. The pastern consists of two right-angles crossing each other to form a series of reversed open triangles. “It’s an Indian sign. I don’t know the exact meaning of it, but it comes from a South American Indian poem called, I think, ‘Inlakesh’. It’s something to do with: you are my brother and I am your brother. That sort of thing. But I see it as a joining of equals and opposites. So I suppose it’s my sort of symbol. This what I have never understood about people. They talk about equality, but in fact they mean they want everyone to be the same. Nothing could be worse, could it?

At the moment and for the past four years, her life has been shared with the successful photographer James Wedge; before that has been that her name was linked in headlines with Prince George Galitzine, a cousin of the Duke of Kent’s who, incongruously, often ekes out a living as a house-painter. She met James Wedge when she was starring as the razzle-dazzle Maggie, the hard-living anti-heroine of Teeth ‘n’ Smiles. And she is slightly surprised by the chain of events even now. “That part really got to me a lot. I did begin to behave in the most extraordinary way. I drank a lot whereas I didn’t drink before. I’d have late nights and I also became very aggressive and bullying. Very self-assertive. Very overtly self-confident, which I am not naturally at all. “I met James during that time. I think that now he’s got to know me he’s never seen the person he first met again.” she adds ruefully. Her great discovery during that time was that a cavalier attitude actually attracted people. She was in constant demand. “People loved it. I suppose people do love having their minds made up for them. I do. I think it is the most difficult thing in life to make a decision. I mean any decision. What to order from a menu-I always end up eating off the other person’s plate: what to buy when you go into a shop for something to wear; what to see when confronted with a list of films. I can’t believe it only happens to me. I’m convinced it happens to other people, too. People love having the decision made for them. It carries through to the important things: what play to do, where to go next in your job.”

Appropriately enough, the comely Miss Mirren first caught the eye of professional critics when she played Cleopatra in a pro- duction by the National Youth Theatre. They were bowled over by the maturity this teenage girl brought to the enigmatic Queen of the Nile. Her passion and her sense of power promised an actress of rare ability, especially in one so young. But it was certainly not as Cleopatra that Helen Mirren first saw herself on stage. Her early ambitions were awakened when she was taken to see a show at the end of Southend Pier. It starred Terry Scott doing his little-boy act, and when the dancing girls on dressed in in pink and blue chiffon, she was so jealous of almost them she cried. “It was the funniest thing I had ever seen in my life. And sud- denly I knew that I wanted to be on that stage with them,” she says. The rest came later, with encouragement from a series of small roles in school plays-Caliban in Tempest being her first smack at Shakespeare. As a little girl she volunteered for the role because no one else wanted it, and fairly frightened herself

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