The stellar British actress discusses her new movie, The Debt, and a career that spans from the 1960s to today.
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Helen Mirren is a tad tired. This seems reasonable – she is 66, lives in three houses on two continents and has been working non-stop, by her own calculation, for the past 10 years – but would seem more so if she looked it. I have seen more decrepit-looking teenagers. Mirren is composed, contained, tiny, gracious. She gives any question her full attention.
So, to what does she ascribe her career longevity in an industry notorious for sidelining women? “About every four years, sometimes less, I’ll go and do some theatre work, and I think that has kept my career going,” she says. “It allows the audience to re-evaluate you. Otherwise, what often happens with actors and actresses is they become very successful, and everybody sees them as that one thing, then they can’t see them as anything else. And when for whatever reason, age or whatever, they’re not that any more, they can’t find their way back into the profession in another way.”
Which is an extremely tactful way of saying versatility is as important for big stars as for so-called character actors. Well, it is if the stars in question are female, anyway. It is hard to see Bruce Willis or Russell Brand straying far beyond the persona we recognise. Willis, with whom Mirren starred in last year’s retired-spy caper Red, will always be the soft-spoken hard man with the wry smile, and if he’s still filming in his eighties, they’ll just have to let him KO the opposition with his Zimmer frame. Brand, the overpaid adult baby to Mirren’s long-suffering nanny in the ghastly remake of Arthur, is a fitfully charming, doe-eyed brat and when the charm evaporates, as it did in that film, we are left with nothing but sprouting follicles atop a pout.
In the past three years, however, Mirren has embodied a frazzled newspaper editor of unimpeachable integrity (State of Play); a female Prospero (The Tempest); a trigger-happy spook with a hazy definition of retirement (Red); the madam of a brothel (Love Ranch, directed by husband Taylor Hackford); Countess Tolstoy, long- and loud-suffering wife of the great Russian novelist (The Last Station); a raddled tea-parlour owner with a saviour complex (Brighton Rock); and a Mossad agent with a conscience as scarred as her cheekbone in John Madden’s The Debt. Meanwhile, her superb performance in the lust-wracked title role of Racine’s Phèdre, at London’s National Theatre, was beamed by satellite all over the world.
Most of these are high-drama roles, although that’s not her choice. She enjoyed making Arthur, she says, and would willingly do more comedy. “Definitely! I have to say, it was really exhausting.” No, she says in response to a slightly facetious question, “not because of Russell: the young director [Jason Winer] was just relentless and these big comedy pieces, they’re very technical”.
So, comedy is harder than drama? “Oh, no. In terms of your personal journey as an actor, drama is very intense and demanding and difficult. But comedy is something that’s constructed, especially comedy on film, because obviously, in the theatre, or stand-up, you’ve got the immediate laugh that tells you whether it’s funny or not. On film, all you know is the crew laughed, but maybe the audience won’t …” But that said, she is categorical she would be up for the challenge.
It seems Mirren can play any kind of woman except weak. Even Phèdre, burning with desire for her stepson, knows exactly what she wants, as well as the hell that will break loose if she gets it. Mirren, one senses, is brave enough to take on any demon, but it is impossible to imagine her playing a ditherer, or a namby-pamby. In purgatory, she would wither.
Today, she wants to talk about The Debt, a remake of an Israeli film that is her first big-screen collaboration with Madden: he was one of the directors of Prime Suspect, the 1990s television series in which she played embattled police detective Jane Tennison, and which secured her reputation outside the theatre.
“I had such a good time working with John last time,” she says. “He was so easy and fun and good at what he did. And then he made Shakespeare in Love and became famous … and so obviously I leapt at the chance to work with him again.” Quite right, too. Britain’s other grandest dame, Judi Dench, has an Oscar nomination and a win from her films with Madden: the nod for her Queen Victoria in Mrs Brown, the prize for Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love. Mirren has her own Oscar, for playing the current monarch in 2006’s The Queen, directed by Stephen Frears.
You can see why she might consider Madden a good person to collaborate with, regardless of whether he’s a bundle of laughs on set. And, in fact, the pair have made a fine thriller, with a more interesting backstory than most. Mirren plays Rachel, an Israeli celebrity for her role, 30 years before, in the capture and killing of a notorious Nazi – a feat that may not have been accomplished quite as reported.
The film flips between the 1990s and those long-ago events, in which Rachel is played by Jessica Chastain, and her male colleagues by Sam Worthington and New Zealander Marton Csokas. The three untried but dedicated agents are sent to Berlin to find a man known as the Surgeon of Birkenau. What happens to them there still binds them 30 years later: Rachel is now divorced from one man (Tom Wilkinson, playing the older Csokas) but still deeply attached both to him and to the other (Ciaran Hinds). And none of them can elude the past – which, after all, is why they were tracking down a Nazi in the first place. “It seemed an incredibly compelling narrative,” says Madden. “It offered an opportunity you don’t often get with thrillers to make the psychological, emotional and moral complexities an integral part of the story.”
As for working with Mirren: “She’s a phenomenal actress, and seemed a perfect fit – she’s playing an iconic woman who is lionised within her own world and has a sophistication, complexity and raw emotional power – and she seems to make a wonderful Israeli, apart from anything else. Also, she’s a fearless actress: the movie requires her – unusually for films – to be her age or even beyond her age, and I wanted that.”
That particular kind of fearlessness is par for the course with Mirren, although she would not call it that – “all you have to do is to look like crap on film and everyone thinks you’re a brilliant actress”, she has commented scornfully. “Actually, all you’ve done is look like crap.”
She is happy to suppress her considerable beauty, and always has been: Rachel has that facial scar, while Ida in Brighton Rock, with her red hair and uneven complexion, looks like Brighton beach at sunset. But then, she’s got no problem with displaying her good looks, either: ever since Caligula, in 1979, she has been celebrated for her willingness to strip when necessary. (She even turned up to her 1967 interview with the Royal Shakespeare Company in an outfit made almost entirely of black string. She got the job.) In fact, were it not for Mirren’s revealing turn as Caesonia, it’s likely no one would remember Caligula, despite the all-star cast (John Gielgud, Malcolm McDowell, Peter O’Toole). It was part-directed by Bob Guccione, founder of Penthouse magazine, and it shows.
Years later, as DCI Tennison, Mirren would get the chance to explore that uneasy place where a drawback becomes an advantage: where being female can stymie or help a woman. The tiny tattoo on her hand, which she got years ago “when I was very, very drunk, because it was the most shocking thing I could think of doing”, is apparently a Native American symbol that means “different but opposite”. It’s not hard to work out where that might come from.
Mirren grew up in Southend-on-Sea, on the English coast, the descendant of Russian aristocrats on one side and working-class English on the other. Her grandfather had come over in 1917 to make an arms deal in London, but was stranded by the Russian Revolution, which he always referred to as “the peasants’ revolt”. His son married the 13th of 14 children, a butcher’s daughter whose grandfather had been butcher to Queen Victoria, and their daughter was born Ilyena Lydia Vasilievna Mironov in 1945.
The Mironovs were a prestigious family, mentioned by Tolstoy in War and Peace, but that didn’t stop Mirren’s father anglicising their name, or driving a taxi to put food on the table. Mirren, of course, has a lovely life: beautiful house in LA with Hackford, London pad on the Thames and a ruin in Puglia, Italy, that they’re doing up. But she has earned it all herself, and has never lost the work ethic that sometimes seems to resemble the famously workaholic Tennison’s. “Often, it’s finish a film, three days to go back to London, pack, repack, go off and start another film, finish that, go back to LA, unpack, repack … and then the films start coming out, so you’re working publicising Arthur one minute, The Debt the next, Brighton Rock another …”
And it cannot have helped that Love Ranch, her first film with her husband in 25 years (they met on White Nights in 1985), was roughly treated by the press. No wonder she’s tired. She intends to take a three-month break, which she presents as if it were the height of indulgence. Yet she has nothing left to prove. She has the glory, the money and the Oscar. Maybe she needs a chance to take stock. You don’t make a film about the debt to six million murdered Jews without a certain amount of reflection.
“It’s important to remember and to find some kind of resolution, whether it’s war crime trials or truth and reconciliation,” she muses. “It’s interesting what Mandela did in South Africa, but people have to remember – what can’t happen is that it just disappears into history and is swept under the carpet. One of our Prime Suspect episodes was about the finding of a Serbian war criminal now working as an eye doctor in London, and I thought that was a powerful story. Obviously, history marches on and things will be forgotten, and that is just the progress of life, but there is great danger in forgetting.”
Helen Mirren in The Debt
Her preparation for The Debt was less about obvious research into Mossad, or how a trained fighter might move and more related to reminding herself of the power and impact of the Holocaust. She visited the former concentration camp at Buchenwald in Germany. “It was incredibly powerful, and the power in it is that you have the opportunity to pay respect to the lives and deaths of those people who suffered and died in horrible circumstances and in, to them, complete anonymity – they had no way of knowing whether in the future anyone would ever know what happened to them. And for me, that was the power of being there, to be able to say, ‘Yes, you died in vain in many ways, but people remember.’”
This is serious stuff, even if it has been provoked by the making of a crowd-pleasing thriller. And there may be more personal reasons for an actress in her mid-sixties to begin thinking about what the general run of people do, and do not, remember. Mirren would probably shrink from the pretension of discussing her “legacy”, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t think about it: she has, after all, dedicated her life to keeping the audience’s attention.
She surely has little to worry about: her characters are the best of the emancipated woman, powerful, self-contained, conflicted (because where’s the interest if life is uncomplicated?) and undeniably sexual. It’s tempting to wish for more like her, but that is not possible (even Chastain, in The Debt, is clearly not going to grow up to be Helen Mirren: no one is). So we’ll just have to demand more of her. Three months, Helen, then we want you back.
THE DEBT, released today. Click here for cinemas and times.