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.

Many thanks to Alvaro for sending in scans of Helen’s May 2018 cover story and article in the British Woman & Home. Much appreciated!

A little bit of everything has been added to the photo gallery this morning, from recent magazine covers to theatre pictures from the 60s! But in order: Helen graces the cover of the May 2018 issue of Woman & Home in the United Kingdom, which is on newsstands now. She has also been featured in the April 2018 issue of the Australian Mindfood magazine and in the March 2018 issue of Sweden’s Sondag magazine. A couple of fantastic additional editorial pictures have been added, as well as two teriffic finds of Helen’s very first steps on the stage. In 1965, after a well received debut as Cleopatra with the National Youth Theatre, Helen transmitted to Manchester’s Century Theatre and played her first professional roles under the direction of Braham Murray – in O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” and in Michael Meyer’s “The Ortolan”. Pictures from both plays have been added to the photo gallery. Enjoy your weekend!

Some great new scans have been added to the photo gallery, including a cover story from the February 2018 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly (same cover as the Allure and Italian Vanity Fair) and a cover from January’s Parade Magazine. There’s also been an article in the recent Los Angeles Times with editorial pictures being added and a new production still from “Winchester”. Enjoy the new additions.

Happy New Year everybody! 2018 treats us well already with a stunning new cover and editorial in the January issue of Rhapsody Magazine. Also added have been another cover story from the December 20 issue of Vanity Fair Italia, scans from December’s Entertainment Weekly and My Weekly as well as February’s Empire Magazine with an article on the upcoming “Winchester”. Enjoy reading.

Photo Gallery – Magazine Scans – Empire Magazine (United Kingdom, February 2018)
Photo Gallery – Magazine Scans – Rhapsody Magazine (USA, January 2018)
Photo Gallery – Magazine Scans – Vanity Fair (Italy, December 26, 2017)
Photo Gallery – Magazine Scans – My Weekly (United Kingdom, December 26, 2017)
Photo Gallery – Magazine Scans – Entertainment Weekly (USA, December 26, 2017)
Photo Gallery – Editorial Photography – 2017 – Session 08
Photo Gallery – Editorial Photography – 2017 – Session 04

Some fantastic new magazines scans have been added to the photo gallery, mostly from this year. A great find is last year’s Australian Woman’s Weekly with a new outtake as well as the Sunday Express’ S Magazine. Also, many thanks to Claudia for submitting the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly. For a complete list of new magazines, have a look at the previews below. Enjoy reading.

Photo Gallery – Articles & Scans – Myself Magazine (Germany, November 2017)
Photo Gallery – Articles & Scans – Woman & Home (United Kingdom, October 2017)
Photo Gallery – Articles & Scans – Entertainment Weekly (USA, September 29, 2017)
Photo Gallery – Articles & Scans – F Magazine (Italy, September 06, 2017)
Photo Gallery – Articles & Scans – Entertainment Weekly (USA, September 01, 2017)
Photo Gallery – Articles & Scans – Gioia Magazine (Italy, September 2017)
Photo Gallery – Articles & Scans – Women’s Weekly (New Zealand, August 28, 2017)
Photo Gallery – Articles & Scans – S Magazine Sunday Exprress (United Kingdom, July 23, 2017)
Photo Gallery – Articles & Scans – Women’s Weekly (Australia, March 2016)

Helen Mirren is the cover star of Allure’s September issue, featuring a stunning new editorial by Scott Rindle. The article, by Allure’s editor-in-chief Michelle Lee, can be read in its entirety on their website. It’s a great read, especially because by tomorrow every media outlet will report on Mirren’s “Trump-bashing”, which isn’t happening, if you still believe in voicing an opinion and bashing a person are two separate things. Here’s a short excerpt from the wonderful interview, pictures can be found below: Not only in her career but also in life, the woman’s got range. She’s the blueprint for every Jennifer Lawrence and Emma Stone who came after her, proving that you can be outspoken yet respected by so many disparate groups if you stay wholly true to yourself. During our morning together, I learn that Mirren is a fan of condiments (her scrambled eggs get ketchup and Tabasco). She’s a self-professed terrible procrastinator. She loves to sleep late. She’s a generous conversationalist who asks copious questions. Her perfect day consists of a long family barbecue in New York, then England, then Los Angeles, and ideally she’d have a teleportation machine.

Helen Mirren graces the cover of AARP Magazine’s December 2016 / January 2017 cover. Their website not only features a stunning new pictorial but also an in-depth interview with lots of great insight on her career and living in America, traveling the US as a young theater actress, her “Collateral Beauty” co-stars and the constant pressure (or rather constant question) of eternal youth: “The best thing about being over 70 is being over 70. Certainly when I was 45, the idea of being 70 was like, “Arghhh!” But you only have two options in life: Die young or get old. There is nothing else. The idea of dying young when you’re 25 is kind of cool — a bit romantic, like James Dean. But then you realize that life is too much fun to do that. It’s fascinating and wonderful and emotional. So you just have to find a way of negotiating getting old psychologically and physically.” The full interview can be read over at the AARP website.

Marie Claire has posted a wonderful extensive article on Helen Mirren, featuring a couple of stage photographs and a school picture on their website: When Helen Mirren was invited to appear on Michael Parkinson’s eponymous chat show in 1975, he must have assumed she would be one of his less contentious guests. This was her first primetime appearance and he was the doyen of celebrity interviews – how could it possibly go wrong? Yet it did – for him – as seen when the footage resurfaced on social media and went viral last August. When Parkinson blithely suggested her ‘equipment’ (nodding towards her breasts) might detract from her acting, Mirren didn’t simper and giggle as he clearly expected her to. Instead, quietly ‘enraged’ as she would later reveal, the actress – then 30 – shut down his sexist questioning with masterful aplomb: ‘I’d like you to explain what you mean by “my equipment”, you mean my fingers? Come on, spit it out,’ she urged him, before dismissing his questions as ‘boring’. Now a Dame, with her latest film Collateral Beauty hitting cinemas this December, she is one of only 13 actresses ever to have achieved what’s known as the Triple Crown of Acting – winning a Tony, Emmy and Oscar. Born Illiana Lydia Petrovna Mironova on 26 July, 1945, in west London, she was one of three children. Her Russian father Vasily, a civil servant, anglicised their names when Helen was nine. Her mother, Kathleen, was the daughter of an east London butcher who supplied meat to Queen Victoria. The family relocated to Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, when Mirren was two, because her parents felt the seaside was a nicer place to raise children. Mirren is fiercely proud of her roots. ‘I am still very much an Essex girl,’ she said. ‘My poshed-over voice was all learnt.’ The complete article can be read here.

In Variety’s 2016 Power of Women issue, Helen Mirren is honored for her work with SAY, the Stuttering Association for the Young. Just after the issue’s cover photo shoot in New York, she sat down for a chat with Variety’s Gordon Cox to talk “Fast 8,” women in Hollywood and the pay gap. In their interview she dishes on the upcoming Fast 8: I had always had a secret hankering to do “Fast and Furious,” because I love driving cars. Of course, when I finally got my chance, I wasn’t driving the bloody car. I was in the back of an ambulance with Jason Statham. Or what superhero would she want to play?
“I’m not really into superheroes very much. But certainly someone who can fly!” Mirren also talks about how Hollywood and roles for women have changed:

There’s been massive progress. I’ve always said this, for my whole career: Don’t worry about the number of roles available for women in drama; worry about the number of roles for women in real life. Because as women’s profile gets raised in all the arenas in real life — politics, business, the medical professions, science, technology, whatever — the world of drama will inevitably reflect that, and roles for women will get better. However, having said that, it still really pisses me off that in many movies, the only time you see more women on the screen than men is in a swimming pool scene, in which case suddenly the world is populated by women in bikinis. And often they’re wearing high heels! No woman ever wears a bikini and high heels around a swimming pool!

The complete interview can be read over at Variety. The cover, alongside this wonderful new photoshoot (and a new imagefrom the Elle shoot as well) have been added to the photo gallery.