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Dame Helen Mirren: 'I love no longer being a sex symbol'
In the grand tradition of great British stars, Dame Helen Mirren has always been a rule-breaker. She married late, never had children, broke Hollywood in her 50s and is, at 70, a bona-fide global icon, happy to reveal that her beauty secrets fly in the face of everything your mother ever told you.
‘I have absolutely no beauty regime,’ she says in that perfectly modulated, husky voice. ‘I sunbathe – I know I shouldn’t but I love sitting in the sun. I drink wine and occasionally I’ll drink to excess. I eat French fries. I’ve never managed to go to the gym for longer than two months. I always forget to take my vitamins.
‘I’ve done everything but I haven’t done too much of anything – I’ve never had a Coca-Cola, ever. Sometimes I use hotel body lotion as conditioner for my hair. I’m not particular. Life is too short and too precious.’
We are sitting in her bedroom at the grand Hôtel Martinez, halfway through the Cannes Film Festival, to talk beauty, because L’Oréal Paris, for whom Mirren has been an ambassador since 2014, is the festival’s official beauty partner.
But the woman who captured the Queen in the 2006 film (and again on stage in the West End in 2013) has opted against a formal audience in a separate suite, as would befit her Oscar-winning superstar status. She prefers a more relaxed approach.
Her open suitcase overflows with clothes and books. Piles of paper and half-eaten plates of fruit are scattered around the room. A breeze from the open window ruffles the Dame’s bobbed blonde hair as she talks about everything from the glories of Kim Kardashian’s bottom to Russian punk band Pussy Riot, her idea of beauty, why she’s relieved to have lost her sex-symbol tag and what makes her proud to be British.
As the face of L’Oréal Paris Age Perfect Rosy Glow Day Moisturiser, Mirren is one of the brand’s most successful ambassadors. She was selected, according to general manager Elen Macaskill, for being ‘brilliant, irreverent, beautiful, sexy and quintessentially British’. Mirren’s one demand was that L’Oréal never retouch her image. ‘Gold, not old’ is her tag line.
Beauty for Mirren is never skin deep. The greatest compliment she ever received, she says, was to be compared by a former boyfriend to one of the peasant women in Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters.
I ask what being ‘worth it’ means to her and she looks serious. All women are worth it, she believes. ‘But we are our own worst enemies. We can be so hard on ourselves. We are all different.’
She laughs. ‘I’m not a goddess type. Never have been. I absolutely love the goddesses. French actresses and Italian actresses always want to be goddesses. But I’m very real.
‘In Britain we produce beautiful women. Kate Moss is beautiful but not just because of her looks; her character and personality are why she’s still an icon. There’s a realness about her that I love.’
As she talks, she emphasises her words with her hands. She flits between being funny, wise, reflective and, every now and then, just a little bit saucy. A free spirit for most of her life, she once dated Peter O’Toole and Liam Neeson but only settled down in her early 50s when she married the American film director Taylor Hackford.
Ageing for her has been a process of simply becoming more of who she is. ‘As you get older, you have learned things, you are able to deal with things. As each age develops you understand your role in the onward sweep of life. It’s all part of the wonderful process of being a human being.’
Her happiness, she believes, has come from making good choices. She pauses. ‘I have lived the life I wanted. You never know because it’s all a crap shoot – terrible things can happen to knock you off your perch and make life hard, so I fully understand how fortunate I have been.
‘And I have had a series of very, very good men in my life. My husband, obviously, is the uber good man, but all the men I had relationships with brought something positive to my life.’
Despite her success (along with that Oscar she has four Baftas and three Golden Globes), her homes in LA, New York, London and France, and her 19-year marriage to Hackford, Mirren remains very much her own woman. She paints, she writes, she practises naturism in the privacy of her own home. Her favourite swear word is f—k.
Ask what she misses about Britain and she says immediately, ‘Oak trees and hedgerows. And I do miss my London when I’m not there.’ Her heroes include, ‘David Hockney, Dawn French, Jo Brand and Olivia Colman. Olivia is the distillation of everything I love about British actresses: great but completely accessible.’
As for the Queen, Mirren – a woman who once described herself as ‘anti-monarchist’ – now admits, ‘I respect the Queen and yes, I do kind of love her. It’s a loving respect.’
In person, Mirren is warm and often hilariously off-message. She gives surprisingly honest answers.
I ask how it feels to be at Cannes and she shakes her head, ‘Well, it’s terribly intimidating, you know. It’s very hard, with all these amazing women – glorious creatures – and their clothes and their make-up… Sometimes you feel wonderful and – it’s the same whether you’re 13 or 26 or 86 – sometimes you feel insecure and frightened. That can change five or six times a day.’
She laughs. ‘The very first time I came to Cannes was to promote the film O Lucky Man! [1973]. I was in Paris working as an experimental theatre actress and living a very bohemian, artistic life and I got a call asking me to come down here. I just thought it would be a wonderful little holiday by the sea. I had no idea.
‘I got the train down and turned up to meet the film company at the hotel. They were horrified when they saw me, a dirty-footed boho from Paris. I was given money and immediately sent off to find a dress. Life is very different now but somewhere in the ghost of these streets is that scruffy boho and somewhere in me she’s buried like a little time bomb, but part of me.’
A few hours after our interview she will emerge in a dazzling black and gold boho-luxe gown by Temperley London, to attend the annual Cannes amfAR fundraising auction. Mirren, in common with her generation, has always had a strong sense of political activism born from the roots of the hippy counterculture she grew up in and has carried that into her A-list world.
‘It’s an honour to be part of it,’ she will tell waiting reporters. ‘Aids is still a devastating illness that is destroying communities and if we can raise money and help then that is a wonderful thing.’
The word Mirren uses most during our conversation is ‘lucky’; in the space of 30 minutes she describes herself as lucky seven times. But Mirren’s success is due to more than luck.
She grew up in Essex, the middle child of Vasily, a Russian immigrant, who fell in love with an East End butcher’s daughter, Kitty. It was a bohemian upbringing. Her father played the viola for the London Philharmonic, while her mother sewed clothes. The young Helen performed in every school play put on by St Bernard’s High School for Girls in Southend.
One of the most important messages Kitty passed on to her daughter was never to worry about growing old. ‘She told me that when I was 20 I would dread the idea of being 40. But that when I was 40 I would never want to be 20 again. It meant nothing to me at the time but she was so right and I always think of it.
‘For me, one of the best things about getting older is finally being relieved of the whole sex-symbol tag,’ she says. ‘There is good and bad in ageing. Each age you become reveals a new person you’ve become. I loved being young but I’ve enjoyed every stage in different ways.
‘I’m happy being in my 70s and there will be another person in me at 80, hopefully, and I can’t wait to meet her. I’m just incredibly grateful to be here and incredibly grateful for my health. When I do anything it’s always to do with health, not beauty.’
She is, she says, thrilled that a new generation of women have redefined what it is to be beautiful. ‘When I was growing up, it was thought to be unbelievably sluttish to even have a bra strap showing. Everything was about women conforming. I love shameless women. Shameless and proud!
‘Women were controlled by being shamed, so I love women who have claimed their own bodies: Madonna, Chrissie Hynde, Joan Jett, Bonnie Raitt. I love Pussy Riot more than anything in the world. They all raise their middle fingers to this epithet of “slut”. They wear what they want to wear, behave as they want to behave.’
Even Kim Kardashian gets the Mirren seal of approval. ‘I’m not into the Kardashians, it’s a phenomenon I just don’t find interesting, but – and this is the big word: B-U-T-T – it’s wonderful that you’re allowed to have a butt nowadays! Thanks to Madame Kardashian, and before her, J-Lo. We’re also allowed to have thighs now, which is great too. It’s very positive.’
It’s easy to forget that of all the great roles in Mirren’s life, it was playing DCI Jane Tennison in the Lynda La Plante television series Prime Suspect, which ran from 1991-2006, that was the real game-changer.
A tough, independent woman, Tennison was one of TV’s first great feminist heroines. Mirren nods in agreement. ‘That was the beginning of a whole new view of women and of drama. And that was thanks to Lynda.’
A new series, Tennison, is soon to be screened on ITV, a prequel to the classic series, about Jane’s early years in the police service in Hackney. Mirren has had no involvement in the show and up until now has made no comment but says, ‘It’s a lovely idea to go back. It’s good for young women to see how the world used to be for women who wanted to become police.’
She gets up to prepare for the photo shoot. I tell her she looks great. She initially demurs then laughs, ‘You see, we hate compliments, us Brits.’ This is a woman who is genuinely worth it.
Helen Mirren is the face of L’Oréal Paris Age Perfect Rosy Glow Day Moisturiser, available nationwide