50 facts about actress Helen Mirren: was appointed a Dame of the British Empire in 2003

Helen's most celebrated role was as Elizabeth II in Stephen Frear's The Queen for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress and numerous other awards throughout the world. Learn 50 facts about actress Helen Mirren.

1.       Helen Mirren is one of the best known and most respected actresses with an international career that spans stage, screen and television and has won many awards for her powerful and versatile performances, including the Academy Award in 2007 for her performance in The Queen.

2.       Helen began her career playing Cleopatra with the National Youth Theatre.

3.       She appeared in rep in Manchester and from there she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company.

4.       After four notable years at the RSC Helen took a complete change of direction, when she went to work with renowned director Peter Brook's theatre company Centre de Recherche Théâtral and toured Africa and America.

5.       Since then her theatre work has spanned numerous productions in the West End, the Fringe, the RSC, the National Theatre and Broadway in the US including A Month in the Country, for which she received a Tony nomination and The Dance of Death on Broadway opposite Ian McKellan.

6.       Subsequent productions include Orpheus Descending at the Donmar Warehouse and Mourning Becomes Electra at the National Theatre for which she was nominated for an Olivier Best Actress Award.

7.       She returned to the National Theatre in 2009 in the title role of Racine's Phèdre directed by Nicholas Hytner. This made history when it became the first theatre production to be filmed for NTLive and seen in cinemas throughout the world.

8.       In her most recent performance in 2013 in London's West End, she reprised her role of Queen Elizabeth II in The Audience by Peter Morgan and directed by Stephen Daldry.

9.       She won an Olivier Award and a What's On Stage award for Best Actress.

10.   In February 2015 The Audience transferred to the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, New York with Helen Mirren still in the title role.

11.   Helen's film career began with Michael Powell's Age of Consent and other early work included Caligula, but her breakthrough role came in John Mackenzie's The Long Good Friday.

12.   Helen continued to make films throughout the 80s including Excaliber, Cal, White Nights, Mosquito Coast and in 1989 Peter Greenaway's The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.

13.   She earned her first Academy Award nomination for her performance as Queen Charlotte in The Madness of King George and her second for her role as the housekeeper in Robert Altman's Gosford Park.

14.   Helen's most celebrated role was as Elizabeth II in Stephen Frear's The Queen for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress and numerous other awards throughout the world.

15.   In recent years, she has starred in Calendar Girls, The Clearing, Shadowboxer, State of Play, The Last Station, Love Ranch, The Tempest, Red, Arthur, Brighton Rock and The Debt.

16.   2013 saw the release of Hitchcock where Helen played Hitchcock's wife Alma Reville to Anthony Hopkins Hitchcock - her performance was nominated for a Golden Globe and a BAFTA.

17.   She reprised her role as the retired British spy Victoria in RED2 with Bruce Willis and John Malkovich and voiced the character Dean Hardscrabble for Disney.Pixar's Monster's University.

18.   In 2014 Helen starred in The Hundred-Foot Journey, directed by Lasse Hallstrom where she played a French restauranteur.

19.   Helen's most recent film projects can be found under Current Projects on this site.

20.   Helen's first leading role in television was as Cousin Bette for the BBC in the 70's; other BBC work at that time included The Changeling, The Philanthropist and the outstanding 1979 production of Denis Potter's Blue Remembered Hills.

21.   However it was in the award-winning series Prime Suspect as DCI Jane Tennison that Helen became a household name in television. Written by Lynda La Plante as a single TV drama it spawned another 4 series in the 90s.

22.   Helen reprised the role in 2003 and the final Prime Suspect was released in 2006, bringing this iconic role to its conclusion and for which she won an Emmy for Best Actress.

23.   During the 'intermission' from Prime Suspect Helen starred in a number of award winning US TV productions including Losing Chase, Ayn Rand and The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone.

24.   Her performance in her television role in Elizabeth I, won her an Emmy and a Golden Globe for Best Actress.

25.   Her most recent television role was in David Mamet's Phil Spector for HBO Films where she starred alongside Al Pacino as Spector's lawyer Linda Kenney Baden - for this role she won a SAG award for Best Actress and was nominated for a Golden Globe.

26.   Helen Mirren was appointed a Dame of the British Empire in 2003.

27.   Mirren lived with actor Liam Neeson during the early 1980s.

28.   Mirren and Neeson had met while working on Excalibur.

29.   Mirren married American director Taylor Hackford on 31 December 1997, his 53rd birthday.

30.   The ceremony took place at the Ardersier Parish Church near Inverness in the Scottish Highlands.

31.   The couple had met on the set of White Nights.

32.   It is her first marriage, and his third.

33.   Mirren has no children and says she has "no maternal instinct whatsoever."

34.   Mirren's autobiography, In the Frame: My Life in Words and Pictures, was published in the UK by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in September 2007.

35.   On 11 May 2010, Mirren attended the unveiling of her waxwork at Madame Tussauds London. The figure reportedly cost £150,000 to make and took four months to complete.

36.   Mirren was listed as one of the fifty best-dressed over 50s by the Guardian in March 2013.

37.   In August 2013, Mirren was announced as one of several new models for Marks & Spencer's 'Womanism' campaign.

38.   She is quoted as being a naturist, telling the Radio Times "I'm a naturist at heart. I love being on beaches where everyone is naked. Ugly people, beautiful people, old people, whatever. It's so unisexual and so liberating."

39.   In 2004, she was named "Naturist of the Year" by British Naturism. She said: "Many thanks to British Naturism for this great honour. I do believe in naturism and am my happiest on a nude beach with people of all ages and races!"

40.   Mirren hosted Saturday Night Live on 9 April 2011.

41.   Mirren attended St Bernard's High School for Girls in Southend-on-Sea, where she acted in school productions, and subsequently a teaching college, the New College of Speech and Drama in London, "housed within Anna Pavlova's old home, Ivy House" on the North End Road - which leads from Golders Green to Hampstead, N. London.

42.   Aged eighteen, she auditioned for the National Youth Theatre (NYT) and was accepted.

43.   By the time she was 20, she was playing Cleopatra in the NYT production of Antony and Cleopatra at the Old Vic, which led to her signing with the agent Al Parker.

44.   She was born Helen Lydia Mironoff.

45.   Her mother was English.

46.   Her father was Russian, originally from Kuryanovo, Smolensk Oblast.

47.   Mirren's paternal grandfather, Colonel Pyotr Vasilievich Mironov, was in the Imperial Russian Army and fought in the 1904 Russo-Japanese War. He later became a diplomat, and was negotiating an arms deal in Britain when he and his family were stranded during the Russian Revolution. The former diplomat became a London cab driver to support his family and eventually settled down in England.

48.   Helen Mirren's father, anglicised the family name to Mirren in the 1950s and changed his name to Basil Mirren.

49.   Her father played the viola with the London Philharmonic before World War II, and later drove a taxi cab and was a driving-test examiner, before becoming a civil servant with the Ministry of Transport.

50.   Mirren's mother was a working-class Londoner from West Ham, East London, and was the 13th of 14 children born to a butcher whose own father had been the butcher to Queen Victoria.

Source: helenmirren.com, Wikipedia.org