She can portray monarchs of any period, but don't forget that she's also the boss. Helen Mirren turns 75 on July 26. A look back at her exceptional career.
As the lifetime work of the British actress is honored at the Berlinale, here's why Helen Mirren is literally the queen of acting.
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A crowned career
Honored at the 2020 Berlinale with a lifetime achievement award, the actress born in 1945 has collected many prestigious prizes over the years. Helen Mirren is shown here in 2007 with her Oscar for her performance in "The Queen." She also obtained Academy Award nominations for her roles in "The Madness of King George" (1994), "Gosford Park" (2001) and "The Last Station" (2009).
Mirren was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her services to drama in 2003 (photo). Even though she once said that her upbringing was "very anti-monarchist," she nevertheless ended up wearing different crowns throughout her career...
Image: Getty Images/AFP/F. Hanson
A triple crown
Mirren is among the few actors to have achieved the so-called Triple Crown of Acting, a title which describes performers who have won an Academy Award for their role in a film, an Emmy Award for a part in a TV series and a Tony Award for a Broadway performance.
Image: Reuters/A. Schmidt
Queen Elizabeth I
She won one of her Emmys for her performance in "Elizabeth I," a two-part British historical drama from 2005 (pictured, with Jeremy Irons). She has obtained 11 nominations for the US award recognizing the best in television — and won it four times, including for her well-known role as the no-nonsense detective Jane Tennison in "Prime Suspect," which originally ran from 1991 to 2006.
Stephen Frears' 2006 biopic "The Queen" focuses on how the British monarch reacted to the death of Lady Diana in 1997. Mirren's studied portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II won her critical praise and several awards, including an Oscar, a BAFTA and Screen Actors Guild Award. Even though the film didn't portray Elizabeth II in a friendly light, the Queen praised Mirren's subtle performance.
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Another Queen Elizabeth II
By winning the Tony Award for the same role in the play titled "The Audience," the 2013 Broadway version of "The Queen," Mirren joined the ranks of other legendary actors with the Triple Crown of Acting, such as Ingrid Bergman, Al Pacino, Frances McDormand and Jeremy Irons — who will also be in Berlin as head of the film festival's jury.
Image: picture alliance/AP Photo/J. Marcus
Queen Cleopatra
At the age of 20, Mirren played Cleopatra for the first time in a National Youth Theatre production. It launched her career, as she went on to join the Royal Shakespeare Company shortly afterwards, and the rising star was luridly dubbed "the sex queen of Stratford." She is shown here in a reprisal of the "Anthony and Cleopatra" play in 1998, with the late Alan Rickman.
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Empress Milonia Caesonia
Mirren also embodied a Roman empress: Milonia Caesonia, the fourth and last wife of emperor Caligula. The kitschy art-porn historical drama "Caligula" from 1979 did not, however, make the most of her acting talent. The film initially received extremely bad reviews, even if it went on to become an underground cult classic. Mirren described it as "an irresistible mix of art and genitals."
Image: Imago Images/Mary Evans Archive/Penthouse
Fairy Queen
In Arthurian legends, the enchantress Morgan le Fay, Arthur's half-sister, is often referred to as the Fairy Queen. Mirren took on the role in John Boorman's historical fantasy "Excalibur" (1981). It's while working on this film that she met actor Liam Neeson, who became her boyfriend in the early 1980s. She then met her future husband, director Taylor Hackford, on another film set in 1985.
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Queen Charlotte
The 1994 historical biopic "The Madness of King George" focuses on the power struggle triggered by the deteriorating mental health of Great Britain's George III, a period known as the Regency Crisis of 1788-89. Starring alongside Nigel Hawthorne, Helen Mirren won the Cannes Film Festival award for best actress for her depiction of Queen Charlotte.
Image: picture-alliance/Everett Collection/Samuel Goldwyn Films
Empress Catherine the Great
Mirren rules once again in the 2019 HBO four part miniseries, "Catherine the Great," in which she portrays Russia's longest-ruling female leader. The 18th-century empress managed to cling on to power following a military coup in 1762. The story even has a link to the Russian aristocratic roots of the actress, whose family name is actually Mironov.
This crown came in 2013: Mirren's legacy was immortalized with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, right next to Colin Firth's, who also won an Oscar for portraying a royal in "The King's Speech." Mirren's reaction: "I think it's very good for the British monarchy that, here on Hollywood Boulevard, the King and the Queen are going to actually sleep together, for the rest of history."
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/M. Nelson
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"Listen, I like to be called Governor or the Boss. I don't like Ma'am — I'm not the bloody Queen," Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison warns her male driver in one episode of the hit British TV crimes series Prime Suspect.
Yet Helen Mirren, who starred in the series as the hard-nosed officer, has also portrayed more than one monarch over the course of the past five decades — from her early on-stage Cleopatra in 1965 to her Oscar-winning depiction of Elizabeth II in Stephen Frear's The Queen (2006), to her recent lead role in the HBO miniseries Catherine the Great (2019).
In these roles, Dame Helen Mirren has embodied the grace and determination of history's most famous female rulers — even as they deal with threats to their grip on power.
Her own family has noble roots, as she details in her 2008 autobiography, In the Frame: My Life in Words and Pictures. Her Russian grandfather was an aristocrat. Pyotr Vasilievich Mironov however lost his status and wealth following the Bolshevik revolution.
Call her Boss: Mirren in 'Prime Suspect'Image: picture-alliance/United Archives/IFTN
She was born Ilynea Lydia Mironoff on July 26, 1945 in London; the family members had their names Anglicized during the Cold War. Even though Helen grew up in a low-income family, they had a love of the arts and she started acting in school productions.
Beyond royal roles
Mirren's career took off as she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1960s and she is the only actor ever to have portrayed both Queens Elizabeth on the screen. But beyond her ties with royalty, she's also tackled an extremely wide range of roles.
On various occasions she stood out as the "wife" involved in hot love affairs — for instance in Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989) — or as the hidden contributor of creative geniuses — such as in Hitchcock (2012).
In 'Woman in Gold,' she's a Jewish refugee who fights to reclaim a Gustav Klimt painting stolen from her family by the NazisImage: SquareOne Entertainment
She's also been one of the tough guys in many other films and series. Beyond her award-winning part as detective Tennison in Prime Suspect, she recently took on a role that had originally been written for a man. In Eye in the Sky (2015), she's army intelligence officer Colonel Katherine Powel, the commander of a secret drone operation to capture high-level Al-Shabaab terrorists in Nairobi.
Fans of the Fast & Furious franchise know that even in action films, Dame Helen Mirren manages to be both the boss and the queen. In the movie series, she plays a seasoned criminal, the mother of Deckard, Hattie and Owen — called Magdalene "Queenie" Shaw.
This season, International Berlin Film Festival celebrated the fact that Helen Mirren rules, handing out the Honorary Golden Bear for lifetime achievement to the actress on February 27.
