The SALON Interview:
Helen Mirren
Interviewed by RICHARD COVINGTON With her sharp tongue and lacerating wit, British actress Helen Mirren does not suffer fools gladly. Yet in her films, she seems utterly beset by them. Unlike the long-suffering queen in "The Madness of King George," the 1994 role that earned her an Oscar nomination, or the agonized mother in a forthcoming film about IRA hunger strikers, in person, the outspoken Mirren gives the impression she would send kings, sons and other fools packing without further ado.
Inescapably regal, with a perpetually bemused look of arch skepticism, Mirren has fashioned a long-running theater, film and television career playing aristocratic characters -- from Lady Macbeth with the Royal Shakespeare Company to Natalya Petrovna in "A Month in the Country" last year in off-Broadway's Roundabout Theatre. Even as Detective Inspector Jane Tennison in the Emmy award-winning television series "Prime Suspect," she keeps herself serenely self-possessed in the midst of the hurly-burly of crime solving. In contrast to some actresses over 40, Mirren's star has only gained luster the older she gets.
Born in London, Mirren started acting in her teens with the National Youth Theatre, performing Shakespeare over the summer school holidays. A string of successful roles with the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford - on-Avon and other theaters in London was interspersed with film and television parts. In the mid-1970s, seeking a radical new direction in her acting, she uprooted herself from London and signed on with Peter Brook's experimental troupe on its journeys of theatrical discovery in Africa and the U.S., performing for tribal villagers and California grapepickers.
In the early 1980s, she met director Taylor Hackford while working on the film "White Nights." The couple now live together in Los Angeles. Mirren rarely works there, preferring to make movies in Europe with European filmmakers, albeit ones backed by Hollywood studios. Among her 23 films, some of the most memorable have been Peter Greenaways "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover;" James Dearden's "Pascali's Island," Paul Schrader's "The Comfort of Strangers," and Peter Weir's "Mosquito Coast."
Jim Sheridan, the director of "My Left Foot" and "In the Name of the Father" is producing Mirren's forthcoming film about the IRA hunger strikers, written by first-time director < href="terry.html">Terry George, the Irish- born scenarist of "In the Name of the Father."
The following interview took place over the course of a film conference in Burgundy in France and was continued by telephone to her home in Los Angeles.
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