Welcome to The Helen Mirren Archives, your premiere web resource on the British actress. Best known for her performances with the Royal Shakespeare Company, "Prime Suspect" and her Oscar-winning role in "The Queen", Helen Mirren is one of the world's most eminent actors today. This unofficial fansite provides you with all latest news, photos and videos on her past and present projects.  Enjoy your stay.
Celebrating
10 years
on the web
Aug
01
2019

After her award-winning performances as Elizabeth I. and Elizabeth II., Dame Helen Mirren is adding another commanding and unforgettable royal ruler to her glittering CV as she heads the cast of Sky Atlantic’s sumptuous drama “Catherine the Great”. The four-part series, which has been filmed in Russia, Latvia and Lithuania, follows the formidable 18th century Russian empress’ dramatic later years as she tranforms her nation into one of Europe’s greatest powers. All the political and sexual intrigue surrounding Catherine’s colorful court is also brought to life, including her passionate and complex romance with military leader Grigory Potemkin (Jascon Clarke), who helps her bring Russia to glory. Gina McKee (Bodyguard) co-stars as Catherine’s confidant and lady-in-waiting Countess Braskovya Bruce and Rory Kinnear is shrewd politian Nikita Panin, the governor to her son Paul (Joseph Quinn). Richard Roxburgh, Kevin McNally, Paul Ritter and Paul Kaye also feature. “Catherine rewrote the rules of governance by a woman and succeeded to the extent of having the word ‘great’ attached to her name”, explains Mirren, who thinks the drama will offer a new take on the empress. “History tried to drag Catherine down. I hope we are going to reinstate her reputation as the incredible leader that she was”.

Related Media

Photo Gallery – Articles & Scans – TV & Satellite Week (July 27, 2019)

Jul
26
2019

At 73, Helen Mirren has learnt a few things about life… finding power in insecurity, why marriage is ultimately the right choice and the joy of a good charity job. With her return to television imminent – playing Catherine the Great in a new miniseries – Emma Clifton looks at the wisdom, worries and loves of the illustrous star. Helen Mirren often makes headlines, and because she’s Helen Mirren, there’s always a feisty coolness to the story behind the news. Recently, there was one such moment when she was asked if she had any regrets about how she has been treated as a young actress. “Being old is cool, but, oh, how I wish I were 18 now with the strength and courage to say ‘Fuck Off,” she said. “If I could go back and tell my younger self anything, it would be this: “Darling, learn these two words: Fuck. Off. All my life I never learnt to say those words, I just learned to be nice, to play along”.

Related Media

Photo Gallery – Articles & Scans – The Australian Women’s Weekly (New Zealand, August 2019)

Jul
16
2019

Multi award winning actress, Dame, legend – Grazia’s Joely Walker sat down with the inimitable Helen Mirren to talk diversity, Instagram and the ‘anti-ageing’ lingo she wishes would kindly jog one…

It’s the final day of the 72nd Cannes Film Festival and in a suite in the Hotel Martinez (where the A-list flock annually), we’re setting up for the arrival of a bona fide British legend – an actress with over five decades experience, 70-plus films under her belt and one of the few Brits to ever scoop up the elusive Triple Crown of Acting (winning an Academy Award, Emmy Award and Tony Award). But to everyone’s surprise (because, in this industry, being fashionably late is wholly expected), L’Oreal Paris Ambassador Dame Helen Mirren arrives on time and with little kerfuffle – no entourage in tow scribbling down convoluted coffee orders, no bodyguards sweeping the styling rail. Instead, just one manager and a laid-back outfit – her hands slouched casually in the pockets of her black Adidas tracksuit bottoms. All-in-all, an oddly serene set up for one of the most iconic British women in film – a testament to her no-fuss, no-fluff attitude. Indeed, fluff is something Helen simply cannot abide, especially when it comes to the cosmetics industry and the way, for decades, women were addressed with scaremongering terminology like the outdated ‘anti-ageing’ rhetoric. ‘How can a product be “anti-ageing”?’ questions Helen. ‘That’s like saying I’m anti-sun, well the sun is going to rise, “Well no, I’m anti it.” But thankfully – with the likes of Helen and many others speaking up on the subject, as well as brands taking note of changing customer expectation – the lingo has shifted as part of a wider sea change in the sector. ‘All of these fences have been slowly broken down. And I think what L’Oreal [Paris] have done is they’ve truly embraced it. They’ve incorporated different ages and genders, they’ve incorporated race, they’ve incorporated disabilities. A diverse, realistic representation of people – an authentic selection of who we all are. It’s why I’m proud to be an Ambassador.’ The complete artice can be read over at Grazia UK.

Related Media

Photo Gallery – Articles & Scans – Grazia (United Kingdom, July 22, 2019)
Photo Gallery – Editorial Photography – 2019 – Session 05

May
20
2019

The photo gallery has been updated with lots of additional pictures of Helen attending the Cannes Film Festival, including pictures from a new event – the HFPA & Participant Media’s Honour of Hep Refugees. Also added is a new cover story from the British Woman’s Weekly, May 21 issue. Enjoy the additions.



Related Media

Photo Gallery – Magazine Scans – Woman’s Weekly (United Kingdom, May 21, 2019)
Photo Gallery – Public Appearances – 2019 – 72nd Cannes Film Festival – HFPA & Participant Honour Hep Refugees
Photo Gallery – Public Appearances – 2019 – 72nd Cannes Film Festival – Les Plus Belles Annees D’Une Vie Premiere

Apr
04
2019

There’s a wonderful lenghty interview with Helen Mirren in the UK Vogue’s Non-Issue, with Jane Fonda on the cover. Here’s an excerpt, the full article can be read over at Vogue: Helen Mirren walks into the Hôtel Regina in Paris with a steely resolve. Throwing off her tan cashmere coat amid the red-velvet grandeur of the Bar Anglais, she reveals a delicate crimson top then runs a hand through her burnished silver hair. A small tattoo – two interlocking Vs at the base of her thumb, a reminder to “love thy neighbour” and the result of a drunken night out with a Native American theatre group some years ago – is just visible below the hem of her left sleeve. She is perfectly windswept. Mirren is not L’Oréal Paris’s oldest ambassador (that honour goes to Jane Fonda), but she is definitely its most frank. “I was stuck in the damn tunnel,” she explains of her slight tardiness, her crackling azure eyes on full beam. “I told the driver, ‘Fuck it, I’ll walk!’” By her own admission, the Academy Award winner tends to “swear like a potty-mouthed sailor”, and hearing Mirren swear is surely one of the great wonders of the modern world. Although the actress’s colourful language has been noted before, I somehow expected it to be a little like hearing one’s own mother swear. It’s not like that at all – it’s guttural. And it suits her.

Her contemporary Meryl Streep came under fire for insisting that not everyone within the close-knit Hollywood community knew about Weinstein’s alleged sexual assaults. But Mirren agrees with her. “Not everyone knew. Do you think Obama would have sent his daughter to intern with Harvey if it had been generally known? Absolutely not. But who did know? I guess that’s the point, that it happened behind closed doors, so those it happens to think they’re the only ones. And they stay silent.

Dec
08
2018

Today, a big new section has been launched – the press library. After 5 years and constantly forgetting that this crucial part is missing to the fansite, it’s finally here. Filled with 300 articles so far, you find magazine profiles, newspaper articles and interviews with Helen Mirren from as early as 1968, promoting her feature film debut in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “Age of Consent” to the most current interview promoting “The Nutcracker and the Four Realms”. Articles can be browsed by year, publication and even cover, as you will find extensive cover galleries for earch decade. While the press library sports a fair number of items, I’m sure there are many more articles out there, waiting to be added. So if you’re a fan, sitting on a stack of magazine articles you would like to share, please drop me a line. Enjoy browsing and reading.

Oct
26
2018

More magazine scans have been added to the photo gallery, as Helen graces the October issue of Fairlady Magazine (South Africa). They’ve missed their chance for a scoop on the upcoming “The Nutcracker and the Four Realms” but talk about beauty, entirely: “I’ve never felt beautiful and I’m objective enough to know that I don’t fit into that category. I’m not bad-looking, but I’m not beautiful”, she says, explaining that as an actress one becomes pragmatic about such things. “You don’t get cast for things, and then you see someone who does and she’s much prettier, but often not such a good actress, and you think: “Ah, okay, I get the picture.” No: for me, still now, it’s to do with wit and intelligence rather than the way I look. I don’t feel clever or funny enough.” Again, from the woman who upbraided Michael Parkinson for behaving like a “sexist old fart” after he interviewed her in 1975, this is unexpected. Many of the young women who Helen recently admitted to feeling in awe of – for the case with which they just say “f**k off” to men – would look up to her as precisely the kind of woman who can hold her own.

Oct
21
2018

The November issue of Harper’s Bazaar (US) has a great interview with Helen Mirren as well as a new – very fitting – photoshoot picture for “The Nutcracker and the Four Realms”. She talks about this, the recent filming of “Catherine the Great” in Russia, and the recently wrappred “The Good Liar”. Here’s an excerpt from her interview, scans can be found in the photo gallery.

Obviously I play her at the height of her power,” Mirren goes on, “but she was very straightforward, a very clever and ambitious person. And of course Russia at that time was amazingly complex, violent, and difficult country to govern. But she felt she could handle it”. She is also intrigued by Catherine’s sexuality. “In our slightly puritanical, Prostestant world, it’s shocking the way she behaved. It was extraordinary for that era. She had four children by four different men”.

Sep
21
2018

Glamour is running an Icons series this week with profile on powerful women, including Jane Fonda, Rita Moreno and Geena Davis so far. Helen is their latest addition with a lenghty article and interview. You can read the complete interview on their site, here’s an excerpt: Helen Mirren, 73, is unquestionably an icon. After more than 50 years in the business, she’s achieved the triple crown of acting (Emmy, Oscar, Tony), making her one Grammy away from an EGOT. Oh, and she’s an actual dame. Just don’t bother asking her about these accomplishments. “Patting yourself on the back is not very productive,” she tells Glamour. “I’m proud of certain projects – they’re all my babies in one way or another – but I don’t dwell on my past achievements. I dwell on future achievements.” Some of those future achievements include playing Mother Ginger in this November’s The Nutcracker and the Four Realms and the titular role in Catherine the Great for HBO, for which she’s currently filming in Lithuania and Russia until the end of the year. That said, there’s one moment from her past that she’s happy to celebrate – something that happened long before Mirren was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire or even the subject of a beloved subway meme.

I made some bold and quite brave moves at various times in my life, maybe slightly professionally suicidal moves,” Mirren says. “But I don’t regret any of it. I always try to make the tapestry of my work as broad as possible. To me, the most successful way to conduct my professional life is to constantly search out new and different things to do.

Apr
30
2018

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.