Dame Helen Mirren has played some formidable women over the years. From Queen Elizabeth I and II, to Detective Jane Tennison, to a retired Israeli Mossad agent, her 50-year acting career is filled with interesting characters.
But there might be no one more formidable or interesting than Dame Mirren herself.
The 68-year-old has told AARP The Magazine that she welcomes solitude and loves pomegranates – two things we think we love about her.
“[Acting] is a very lonesome operation, actually,” she said. “I’m perfectly happy being on my own. It doesn’t make me crazy.”
At her 500-year-old villa in the south of Italy she tends to 400 pomegranate trees, including four which are 100 years old.
“I love, love pomegranate trees,” she said.
Mirren candidly covered a lot terrain in the interview. Of never having children, she said “I never felt the need for a child and never felt the loss of it.
“I’d always put my work before anything.”
Of her unique career which began in 1960s at the Royal Shakespeare Company, she said, “I pursued the kind of career that I wanted to pursue, which was not to do with fame and fortune. I was a pretty successful actress, actually, right from the beginning but didn’t become a household name because the kind of material I did was quite esoteric.”
Mirren once described marriage as “voluntary imprisonment,” but she tied the knot with film director Taylor Hackford in 1984. She is lucky to have found love later in life, she says. “I used to say to Taylor, ‘Oh, why didn’t we meet earlier?’ But it’s a really good thing, because we probably wouldn’t be together now. I couldn’t have dealt with him earlier on. He would have been much too difficult. He was quite difficult as it was, but I got through that.”
Mirren won the Oscar for Best Actress in 2007.
Mirren’s father was a Russian immigrant and her mother a working-class East Londoner who was was the 13th of 14 children. The actress’ upbringing was modest and she and her two siblings were encouraged to be ambitious, which clearly paid off. Mirren has won an Academy Award for Best Actress, four BAFTAs, three Golden Globes, four Emmy Awards, and two Cannes Film Festival Best Actress Awards. In 2003 she received a damehood for services to the performing arts at a ceremony at Buckingham Palace in 2003.
“I’d like to be remembered as a productive person and someone who at least did no harm. And certainly as a great artist, because that’s been my primary motivating force. And also, as a nice person — though I’m sure a lot of people don’t think I’m nice!”
