Royalty, royalty, royalty.
One actress, Helen Mirren, has played two of Britain’s most imposing monarchs, Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II, in successive productions.
Mirren won an Emmy Award for that first role in the eponymous TV mini-series, and she’s a likely Oscar candidate for her portrayal in “The Queen,” which hits theaters Friday. She’s already taken the Venice Film Festival’s best actress prize for it.
“It’s an incredible honor in terms of your work as an actress, to be able to play those two queens,” Mirren said. “Literally back-to-back too. I did one, had like a two-week break, then started the second one.”
Renegade actress
For much of her career, Mirren has been attracted to what might be called outlaw projects. Though classically trained by the Royal Shakespeare Company, Mirren has often gone for shocking work–insurgent art flicks, gritty crime dramas, even kitsch historical porn.
And she was known for shedding her clothes in many of them. As late as 2003, Mirren took it all off in “Calendar Girls.” Earlier this year, the 61-year-old actress co-starred in the cross-generational, semi-incestuous assassins romance “Shadowboxer.”
No royalist
“I was brought up a republican, very, very against the whole concept of monarchy,” Mirren says. “I guess I was critical of the royals for many, many years. So it’s not like I have a natural tendency toward the kind of groveling sycophancy that surrounds the monarchy often, and I do hate it. They are given so much more than the rest of us. But on the other hand, they’re criticized more than the rest of us.”
Set immediately after the death of Princess Diana, the movie takes us inside Elizabeth’s homes in Scotland and London, as new Prime Minister Tony Blair struggles to convince the aloof royals to leave their summer castle and address the thousands of mourners filling the streets of the capital.
Scary role
“The Queen” both impressed and frightened Mirren to such an extent that she just had to do it.
“I was terrified,” she admits. “I was really scared, because you can’t win when you’re playing a real-life part that everybody is so familiar with. It’s like playing Elvis or something; the look, the sound, the way they move, everything is so familiar. It’s terrifying because you don’t know if you’re going to get all of that stuff right or not.
“Also, obviously, I am British, and I live in Britain, where the royal family are loved and respected and vilified and criticized and all of that,” Mirren adds.
More Top Picks Best Squeeze Bottles For Plating And Sauces
Private queen
“You can look at all the film in the world on the queen, and she–like the rest of us–gets paralyzed with self-consciousness if the camera is on her,” Mirren observes.
“She’s not being herself at all, so you can’t really look behind that curtain of public face. There are different levels of it, but to really get into the private person, there was only one little, tiny piece of film where you suddenly saw the real Elizabeth pop out. It was when she was watching a horse race, and she gets very excited because her horse is winning. She just becomes like an excited young girl–and she’s in her 50s.”