Dame Helen Mirren (born 26 July 1945) is an English stage, film and television actress.

She’s 63!

She has won an Oscar, four SAG Awards, four BAFTAs, three Golden Globes and four Emmy Awards during her career.

Mirren was born Ilyena Vasilievna Mironov in a corridor of the maternity wing of Queen Charlotte’s Hospital, Hammersmith in West London. Her father, Vasiliy Petrovich Mironov (1913-1980), was of Russian origin, and her mother, Kathleen Alexandrina Eva Matilda (1909-1980), was English. Mirren’s paternal grandfather, Pyotr Vassilievich Mironov, a Russian nobleman, tsarist colonel and diplomat, was negotiating an arms deal in Britain and was stranded there, along with his family, during the Russian Revolution. Mirren’s great-great-great-great-grandfather was the Russian field-marshal Mikhail Kamensky, one of the heroes of the Napoleonic wars.

Her father called himself Basil and changed the family name to Mirren in the 1950s. He played the viola with the London Philharmonic before World War II and later drove a cab and was a driving-test examiner, before becoming a civil servant with the Ministry of Transport. Mirren’s mother was from West Ham, London and was the thirteenth of fourteen children born to a butcher whose father had been the butcher to Queen Victoria. Mirren considers her upbringing to have been “very anti-monarchist”.

The first house she remembers living in was in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, when she was two or three years old, after the birth of her younger brother, who was named Peter Basil after his grandfather and great-great-grandfather. Mirren was the second of three children, born two years after her older sister Katherine (“Kate”).

Mirren once famously remarked of her time in Southend as “relentlessly dull,” stating that Southend was at most “the armpit of the country.”

Mirren attended a Catholic girls’ school, St. Bernard’s High School, in Southend-on-Sea, and subsequently a teaching college, the New College of Speech and Drama in London “housed within Anna Pavlova’s old home, Ivy House” on the Hampstead Road. At age eighteen, she auditioned for the National Youth Theatre and was accepted. By age 20 she was starring as Cleopatra in the NYT production of Antony and Cleopatra at the Old Vic, which led to her signing with the agent Al Parker.

Personal Life:

Mirren married American director Taylor Hackford (her partner since 1986) whom she met on the set of White Nights, in the Scottish Highlands on 31 December 1997, his 53rd birthday. It was her first marriage, and his third (he has two children from his previous marriage). Mirren has no children and says she has “no maternal instinct whatsoever.”

On 5 December 2003, she was invested as a Dame Commander of the British Empire. When she received the honour, Mirren commented that Prince Charles was “very graceful” but forgot to give her half of the award, where another person had to remind him to give Mirren the star. She also stated that she felt wary about accepting the award and had to be persuaded by fellow comrades to accept the DBE. In 1996 she had previously declined a CBE.

Mirren’s autobiography was published in the UK by Weidenfeld and Nicholson in September 2007, under the title In the Frame: My Life in Words and Pictures. Reviewing for The Stage, John Thaxter wrote:

“Sumptuously illustrated, at first sight it looks like another of those photo albums of the stars. But between the pictures there are almost 200 pages of densely printed text, an unusually frank story of her private and professional life, mainly in the theatre, the words clearly Mirren’s own, delivered with forthright candour.”

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