68 Facts About Helen Mirren

Helen Mirren has been honoured with the BAFTA Fellowship in 2014, the Honorary Golden Bear in 2020, and the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 2022.

Helen Mirren started her career at the age of 18 as a performer with the National Youth Theatre, where she played Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra.

Helen Mirren later joined the Royal Shakespeare Company and made her West End stage debut in 1975.

Helen Mirren went on to receive the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress for playing Elizabeth II in the Peter Morgan play The Audience.

Helen Mirren reprised the role on Broadway and won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play.

Helen Mirren was Tony-nominated for A Month in the Country and The Dance of Death.

Helen Mirren won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II in the drama The Queen.

Helen Mirren was Oscar-nominated for her roles in The Madness of King George, Gosford Park, and The Last Station.

On television, Helen Mirren played DCI Jane Tennison in ITV's police procedural Prime Suspect, where she earned three British Academy Television Awards for Best Actress and two Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or Movie.

Helen Mirren acted in Door to Door, Phil Spector, Catherine the Great, and 1923.

Helen Mirren was born Ilyena Lydia Mironov on 26 July 1945 at Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital in the Hammersmith district of London, to an English mother and Russian father.

Helen Mirren's mother, Kathleen "Kitty" Alexandrina Eva Matilda, was a working-class woman from West Ham, the thirteenth of fourteen children born to a butcher whose own father was the butcher to Queen Victoria.

Helen Mirren's father, Vasily Petrovich Mironoff, was a member of an old exiled family of the Russian nobility dating back to the first half of the 15th century; he was taken to England when he was two by his father, Pyotr Vasilievich Mironov.

Helen Mirren later became a diplomat in the service of Nicholas II and was negotiating an arms deal in Britain when he and his family were stranded by the Russian Revolution in 1917.

Helen Mirren settled in London and became a cab driver to support his family.

Helen Mirren was an ambulance driver during the war, and served in the East End of London during the Blitz.

Helen Mirren later worked as a driving-test examiner, then became a civil servant with the Ministry of Transport.

Helen Mirren was the second of three children; she has an older sister Katherine and had a younger brother Peter Basil.

Helen Mirren attended Hamlet Court primary school in Westcliff-on-Sea, where she had the lead role in a school production of Hansel and Gretel, and St Bernard's High School for Girls in Southend-on-Sea, where she acted in school productions.

Helen Mirren subsequently attended a teaching college, the New College of Speech and Drama in London, "housed within Anna Pavlova's old home, Ivy House" on North End Road in Golders Green.

Helen Mirren appeared in four productions, directed by Braham Murray for Century Theatre at the University Theatre in Manchester, between 1965 and 1967.

In 1972 and 1973, Helen Mirren worked with Peter Brook's International Centre for Theatre Research and joined the group's tour in North Africa and the US, during which they created The Conference of the Birds.

Helen Mirren then rejoined the RSC, playing Lady Macbeth at Stratford in 1974 and at the Aldwych Theatre in 1975.

Helen Mirren has appeared in a large number of films throughout her career.

Helen Mirren is known for her role as detective Jane Tennison in the widely viewed Prime Suspect, a multiple award-winning television drama series that was noted for its high quality and popularity.

Primarily due to Prime Suspect, in 2006 Helen Mirren came 29th on ITV's poll of TV's 50 Greatest Stars voted by the British public.

Helen Mirren's co-stars were John Hurt as her aimless lover Rakitin and Joseph Fiennes in only his second professional stage appearance as the cocksure young tutor Belyaev.

Helen Mirren appeared in The Madness of King George, Some Mother's Son, Painted Lady and The Prince of Egypt.

In Peter Greenaway's colourful The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Helen Mirren plays the wife opposite Michael Gambon.

In 1998, Helen Mirren played Cleopatra to Alan Rickman's Antony in Antony and Cleopatra at the National Theatre.

Helen Mirren portrayed Ayn Rand in the television film, The Passion of Ayn Rand, where her performance won her an Emmy; Door to Door ; and The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone.

Helen Mirren continued her successful film career when she starred in Gosford Park with Maggie Smith and Calendar Girls with Julie Walters.

Helen Mirren provided the voice for the supercomputer "Deep Thought" in the film adaptation of Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Helen Mirren is the only actor to have portrayed both Queens Elizabeth on the screen.

Helen Mirren portrayed a devoted plantswoman in the film, who coaches a team of prison gardeners, led by Clive Owen, to victory at a prestigious flower show.

In 2003, Helen Mirren starred in Nigel Cole's comedy Calendar Girls, inspired by the true story of a group of Yorkshire women who produced a nude calendar to raise money for Leukaemia Research under the auspices of the Women's Institutes.

Helen Mirren initially was reluctant to join the project, dismissing it as another middling British picture, but rethought her decision upon learning of the casting of co-star Julie Walters.

Helen Mirren played Queen Elizabeth I in 2005, in the television serial Elizabeth I, for Channel 4 and HBO, for which she received an Emmy Award and a Golden Globe Award.

Helen Mirren won another Emmy Award on 16 September 2007 for her role in Prime Suspect: The Final Act on PBS in the same category as in 2006.

In 2006, Helen Mirren starred in "The Queen" directed by Stephen Frears, for which she won an Academy Award for Best Actress.

Helen Mirren later appeared in supporting roles in the films National Treasure: Book of Secrets, Inkheart, State of Play, and The Last Station, for which she was nominated for an Oscar.

Helen Mirren starred in the principal role of Prospera, the duchess of Milan, in Julie Taymor's The Tempest.

Helen Mirren played a gutsy tea-shop owner who tries to save one of her young employees from marrying a teenage killer in Rowan Joffe's Brighton Rock, a crime film loosely based on Graham Greene's 1938 novel.

Helen Mirren was initially hesitant to sign on due to film's graphic violence, but changed her mind upon learning of Bruce Willis's involvement.

In preparation for her role as a retired Israeli Mossad agent in the film The Debt, Helen Mirren reportedly immersed herself in studies of Hebrew language, Jewish history, and Holocaust writing, including the life of Simon Wiesenthal, while in Israel in 2009 for the filming of some of the movie's scenes.

In 2012, Helen Mirren played Alfred Hitchcock's wife Alma Reville in the 2012 biopic Hitchcock based on Stephen Rebello's non-fiction book Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho.

Helen Mirren found the role "difficult to play" and cited doing it as "one of the hardest things [she has] ever done".

Also in 2013, Helen Mirren voiced the character of Dean Abigail Hardscrabble in Pixar's animated comedy film Monsters University, which grossed $743 million against its estimated budget of $200 million, and reprised her role in the sequel film Red 2.

In 2015, Helen Mirren reunited with her former assistant Simon Curtis on Woman in Gold, co-starring Ryan Reynolds.

Helen Mirren had a larger role in director Paolo Virzi's English-language debut The Leisure Seeker, based on the 2009 novel of the same name.

At the 75th awards ceremony, Helen Mirren received her 15th Golden Globe nomination.

In 2018, Helen Mirren portrayed heiress Sarah Winchester in the supernatural horror film Winchester, directed by The Spierig Brothers.

Helen Mirren appeared in the 2022 music video for Kendrick Lamar's "Count Me Out" as a therapist.

Helen Mirren portrayed Golda Meir, prime minister of Israel from 1969 to 1974, in a 2023 biopic entitled Golda.

Helen Mirren lived with Northern Irish actor Liam Neeson during the early 1980s; they met while working on Excalibur.

When interviewed by James Lipton for Inside the Actors Studio, Neeson said Helen Mirren was instrumental in his getting an agent.

In 1985 on the set of White Nights, Helen Mirren met American director Taylor Hackford.

Helen Mirren has no children herself, and has stated that she has "no maternal instinct whatsoever".

In 2006, Helen Mirren stated that she was never a member of any political party.

Helen Mirren became a US citizen in 2017 and voted in her first US election in 2020.

Helen Mirren supported Patricia Ackerman in her unsuccessful 2020 campaign against Mark Amodei in.

In 1990, Helen Mirren said in an interview that she was an atheist.

Helen Mirren stopped using it after reading that Klaus Barbie made a living from cocaine dealing.

On 11 May 2010, Helen Mirren attended the unveiling of her waxwork at Madame Tussauds in London.

In March 2024, to commemorate the 65th anniversary of International Women's Day, Helen Mirren was one of a number of female celebrities who had their likeness turned into Barbie dolls.

Helen Mirren is the recipient of numerous accolades and is the only performer to have achieved both the American and the British Triple Crowns of Acting.

In January 2009, Helen Mirren was named on The Times' list of the top 10 British actresses of all time.

In 2021, Helen Mirren was named by Carnegie Corporation of New York as an honoree of the Great Immigrants Award.