Age, Biography, and Wiki
Helen Mirren was born on July 26, 1945, as Ilyena Lydia Vasilievna Mironov. She is an accomplished actress known for her versatility and commanding presence on screen and stage. Mirren has received numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, five Emmy Awards, a Tony Award, and four BAFTA Awards. She is the only person to have achieved both the US and UK Triple Crowns of Acting.
| Occupation | Movie Actress |
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| Date of Birth | 26 July 1945 |
| Age | 79 Years |
| Birth Place | Hammersmith, London, England |
| Horoscope | Leo |
| Country | England |
Height, Weight & Measurements
While specific details about her height and weight are not widely discussed, Helen Mirren is known for her elegance and stature, often standing out in her roles due to her commanding presence.
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Dating & Relationship Status
Mirren is married to American director Taylor Hackford, whom she met in 1986 during the filming of White Nights. They were married in December 1997. Previously, she dated actor Liam Neeson during the early '80s after meeting on the set of Excalibur in 1981. She has stated that she has no children and lacks a maternal instinct.
Mirren's first credited film role was in Herostratus (1967) and her first major role was in Age of Consent (1969). She gained further recognition for her roles in O Lucky Man! (1973), Caligula (1979), The Long Good Friday (1980), Excalibur (1981), The Mosquito Coast (1986), and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989). She received Academy Award nominations for her performances in The Madness of King George (1994) and Gosford Park (2001), before winning Best Actress for her portrayal of Elizabeth II in the drama The Queen (2006). She was nominated again for her performance in The Last Station (2009), and went on to appear in further films such as The Tempest (2010), Hitchcock (2012), Eye in the Sky (2015), and Trumbo (2015). She has also appeared in the action film Red (2010) and its 2013 sequel, as well as four films in the Fast & Furious franchise.
Her mother, Kathleen "Kitty" Alexandrina Eva Matilda (née Rogers; 1908–1996), 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. Mirren's father, Vasily Petrovich Mironoff (1913–1980), 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 (1880–1957). Pyotr Vasilievich Mironov owned a large family estate near Gzhatsk (now Gagarin) in the Russian Empire. His mother, Mirren's great-grandmother, was Countess Lydia Andreevna Kamenskaya (1848–1928), an aristocrat and a descendant of Count Mikhail Fedotovich Kamensky, a prominent Russian general in the Napoleonic Wars. Her grandfather, Pyotr Vasilievich Mironov, also served as a colonel in the Imperial Russian Army and fought in the 1904 Russo-Japanese War. He 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. He settled in London and became a cab driver to support his family.
Vasily Mironoff also played the viola with the London Philharmonic Orchestra before World War II. He was an ambulance driver during the war, and served in the East End of London during the Blitz. He and Kathleen Rogers married in Hammersmith in 1938, and at some point before 1951 he anglicised his first name to Basil. Shortly after Helen's birth, her father left the orchestra and returned to driving a cab to support the family. He later worked as a driving-test examiner, then became a civil servant with the Ministry of Transport. In 1951, he changed the family name to Mirren by deed poll. Mirren considers her upbringing to have been "very anti-monarchist". She was the second of three children; she has an older sister Katherine ("Kate"; born 1942) and had a younger brother Peter Basil (1947–2002). Her paternal cousin was Tania Mallet, a model and Bond girl. Mirren was brought up in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex.
Mirren appeared in The Madness of King George (1994), Some Mother's Son (1996), Painted Lady (1997) and The Prince of Egypt (1998). In Peter Greenaway's colourful The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Mirren plays the wife opposite Michael Gambon. In Teaching Mrs. Tingle (1999), she plays sadistic history teacher Mrs. Eve Tingle. In 1998, Mirren played Cleopatra to Alan Rickman's Antony in Antony and Cleopatra at the National Theatre. The production received poor reviews; The Guardian called it "plodding spectacle rarely informed by powerful passion", while The Daily Telegraph said "the crucial sexual chemistry on which any great production ultimately depends is fatally absent". In 2000 Nicholas Hytner, who had worked with Mirren on the film version of The Madness of King George, cast her as Lady Torrance in his revival of Tennessee Williams' Orpheus Descending at the Donmar Warehouse in London. Michael Billington, reviewing for The Guardian, described her performance as "an exemplary study of an immigrant woman who has acquired a patina of resilient toughness but who slowly acknowledges her sensuality."
In 2007, Mirren said that the director Michael Winner had treated her "like a piece of meat" at a casting call in 1964. Asked about the incident, Winner told The Guardian, "I don't remember asking her to turn around but if I did I wasn't being serious. I was only doing what the [casting] agent asked me – and for this I get reviled! Helen's a lovely person, she's a great actor and I'm a huge fan, but her memory of that moment is a little flawed." In 2010, Mirren appeared in five films. In Love Ranch, directed by her husband Taylor Hackford, she portrayed Sally Conforte, one half of a married couple who opened the first legal brothel in the US, the Mustang Ranch in Storey County, Nevada. Mirren starred in the principal role of Prospera, the duchess of Milan, in Julie Taymor's The Tempest. This was based on the play of the same name by Shakespeare; Taymor changed the original character's gender to cast Mirren as her lead. While the actor garnered strong reviews for her portrayal, the film itself was largely panned by critics.
In preparation for her role as a retired Israeli Mossad agent in the film The Debt, 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. The film is a remake of a 2007 Israeli film of the same name. In 2012, 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. The film centres on the pair's relationship during the making of Psycho, a controversial horror film that became one of the most acclaimed and influential works in the filmmaker's career. It became a moderate arthouse success and garnered a lukewarm critical response from critics, who felt that it suffered from "tonal inconsistency and a lack of truly insightful retrospection." Mirren was universally praised, however, with Roger Ebert noting that the film depended most on her portrayal, which he found to be "warm and effective". Her other film that year was The Door, a claustrophobic drama film directed by István Szabó, based on the Hungarian novel of the same name. Set at the height of communist rule in 1960s Hungary, the story of the adaptation centres on the abrasive influence that a mysterious housekeeper wields over her employer and successful novelist, played Martina Gedeck. Mirren found the role "difficult to play" and cited doing it as "one of the hardest things [she has] ever done".
The following year, Mirren replaced Bette Midler in David Mamet's biographical television film Phil Spector about the American musician. The HBO film focuses on the relationship between Spector and his defence attorney Linda Kenney Baden, played by Mirren, during the first of his two murder trials for the death in 2003 of Lana Clarkson in his California mansion. Spector received largely mixed to positive reviews from critics, particularly for Mirren and co-star Al Pacino's performances, and was nominated for eleven Primetime Emmy Awards, also winning Mirren a Screen Actors Guild Award at the 20th awards ceremony. The film drew criticism both from Clarkson's family and friends, who charged that the suicide defence was given more merit than it deserved, and from Spector's wife, who argued that Spector was portrayed as a "foul-mouthed megalomaniac" and a "minotaur". Also in 2013, 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. The action comedy received a mixed reviews from film critics, who called it a "lackadaisical sequel", but became another commercial success, making over $140 million worldwide.
Mirren's only film of 2016 was Collateral Beauty, directed by David Frankel. Co-Starring Will Smith, Keira Knightley, and Kate Winslet, the ensemble drama follows a man who copes with his daughter's death by writing letters to time, death, and love. The film earned largely negative reviews from critics, who called it "well-meaning but fundamentally flawed." In 2017, Mirren narrated Cries from Syria, a documentary film about the Syrian Civil War, directed by Evgeny Afineevsky. Also that year, she made an uncredited cameo appearance in F. Gary Gray's The Fate of the Furious, the eighth instalment in the Fast & Furious franchise, playing Magdalene, the mother of Owen and Deckard Shaw. Mirren had a larger role in director Paolo Virzì's English-language debut The Leisure Seeker, based on the 2009 novel of the same name. On set, she was reunited with Donald Sutherland with whom she had not worked again since Bethune: The Making of a Hero (1990), portraying a terminally ill couple who escape from their retirement home and take one last cross-country adventure in a vintage van. At the 75th awards ceremony, Mirren received her 15th Golden Globe nomination.
In 2018, Mirren portrayed heiress Sarah Winchester in the supernatural horror film Winchester, directed by The Spierig Brothers. In the same year, she starred as Mother Ginger in Disney's adaptation of The Nutcracker, titled The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, directed by Lasse Hallström and Joe Johnston. In 2019, she appeared in the ensemble film Berlin, I Love You, the French crime thriller film Anna, directed and written by Luc Besson, and co-starred in the Fast and the Furious spin-off Hobbs & Shaw.
In 1985 on the set of White Nights, Mirren met American director Taylor Hackford. The pair began dating in 1986. The couple married on 31 December 1997, Hackford's 53rd birthday, at the Ardersier Parish Church near Inverness in the Scottish Highlands. It is her first marriage and his third. He has two children from his previous marriages. She has no children herself, and has stated that she has "no maternal instinct whatsoever". She added, "I'm so happy I don't have children. But I do love children and I've got family, and Taylor has children that I'm involved with - and with great pleasure - but it's just not for me." Mirren's autobiography, In the Frame: My Life in Words and Pictures, was published in the UK by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in September 2007. 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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| Husband | Taylor Hackford (m. 31 December 1997) |
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Net Worth and Salary
Helen Mirren's net worth is estimated at $100 million, combined with her husband Taylor Hackford. Her earnings vary significantly based on the film's budget and her role. For supporting roles in major blockbusters, she reportedly earns around $2 million, while leading roles can increase her paycheck to $8 million.
Career, Business, and Investments
Mirren has had a prolific career spanning over six decades, with prominent roles in film, television, and theater. She started her career at 18 with the National Youth Theatre and later joined the Royal Shakespeare Company. Some of her notable roles include playing Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen and reprising the role in the play The Audience. She has also been involved in recent projects, such as narrating the movie Barbie and her role in 1923.
Dame Helen Mirren (born Ilyena Lydia Vasilievna Mironov; 26 July 1945) is an English actor. With a career spanning over six decades of screen and stage, her accolades include an Academy Award, five Emmy Awards, a Tony Award, four BAFTA Awards, and a Laurence Olivier Award. She is the only person to have achieved both the US and UK Triple Crowns of Acting, and has also received the BAFTA Fellowship, Honorary Golden Bear, and the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award. Mirren was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) by Queen Elizabeth II in 2003.
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 (1965). She later joined the Royal Shakespeare Company and made her West End stage debut in 1975. She went on to receive the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress for playing Elizabeth II in the Peter Morgan play The Audience (2013). She reprised the role on Broadway and won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play. She was Tony-nominated for A Month in the Country (1995) and The Dance of Death (2002).
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 also acted in school productions. She 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. At the age of eighteen, she passed the audition for the National Youth Theatre (NYT); and at twenty, she played Cleopatra in the NYT production of Antony and Cleopatra at the Old Vic, a role which she says "launched my career" and led to her signing with agent Al Parker.
In 1970, the director and producer John Goldschmidt made a documentary film, Doing Her Own Thing, about Mirren during her time with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Made for ATV, it was shown on the ITV network in the UK. In 1972 and 1973, 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. She then rejoined the RSC, playing Lady Macbeth at Stratford in 1974 and at the Aldwych Theatre in 1975. In 1976, she appeared with Laurence Olivier, Alan Bates and Malcolm McDowell in a production of Harold Pinter's The Collection as part of the Laurence Olivier Presents series.
At the West End's Royal Court Theatre in September 1975, she played the role of a rock star named Maggie in Teeth 'n' Smiles, a musical play by David Hare; she reprised the role the following year in a revival of the play at Wyndham's Theatre in May 1976. Beginning in November 1975, Mirren played in West End repertory with the Lyric Theatre Company as Nina in The Seagull and Ella in Ben Travers's new farce The Bed Before Yesterday ("Mirren is stirringly voluptuous as the Harlowesque good-time girl": Michael Billington, The Guardian). At the RSC in Stratford in 1977, and at the Aldwych the following year, she played a steely Queen Margaret in Terry Hands' production of the three parts of Henry VI, while 1979 saw her 'bursting with grace', and winning acclaim for her performance as Isabella in Peter Gill's production of Measure for Measure at Riverside Studios. Mirren has appeared in a large number of films throughout her career. Some of her earlier film appearances include roles in Herostratus (1967, Dir. Don Levy), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1968), Age of Consent (1969), and O Lucky Man! (1973).
During her career, Mirren has portrayed three British queens in different films and television series: Elizabeth I in the television series Elizabeth I (2005), Elizabeth II in The Queen (2006), and Charlotte in The Madness of King George (1994). She is the only actor to have portrayed both Queens Elizabeth on the screen. For Elizabeth I, she received an Emmy Award and a Golden Globe Award. For The Queen, she won the Academy Award for Best Actress, the BAFTA, and a Golden Globe, among many other awards. During her acceptance speech at the Academy Award ceremony, she praised and thanked Elizabeth II and stated that she had maintained her dignity and weathered many storms during her reign. 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. Mirren hosted Saturday Night Live on 9 April 2011. 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.
In the Queen's 2003 Birthday Honours, Mirren was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) for services to drama, with investiture taking place at Buckingham Palace in December. For playing Jane Tennison in ITV's Prime Suspect, in 2006, the British public ranked her number 29 in ITV's poll of TV's 50 Greatest Stars. In January 2009, Mirren was named on The Times' list of the top 10 British actresses of all time. The list included Julie Andrews, Helena Bonham Carter, Judi Dench and Audrey Hepburn. In 2021, Mirren was named by Carnegie Corporation of New York as an honoree of the Great Immigrants Award.
Social Network
While Helen Mirren is not highly active on social media platforms, her professional presence is well-established through her work and public appearances.
As a result of her work for the National Youth Theatre, Mirren was invited to join the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). While with the RSC, she played Castiza in Trevor Nunn's 1966 staging of The Revenger's Tragedy, Diana in All's Well That Ends Well (1967), Cressida in Troilus and Cressida (1968), Rosalind in As You Like It (1968), Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1970), Tatiana in Gorky's Enemies at the Aldwych (1971), and the title role in Miss Julie at The Other Place (1971). She also appeared in four productions, directed by Braham Murray for Century Theatre at the University Theatre in Manchester, between 1965 and 1967.
In 1981, Mirren returned to the Royal Court for the London premiere of Brian Friel's Faith Healer. That same year she also won acclaim for her performance in the title role of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, a production of Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre which was later transferred to The Roundhouse in Chalk Farm, London. Reviewing her portrayal for The Sunday Telegraph, Francis King wrote: "Miss Mirren never leaves it in doubt that even in her absences, this ardent, beautiful woman is the most important character of the story." In her performance as Moll Cutpurse in The Roaring Girl—at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in January 1983, and at the Barbican Theatre in April 1983—she was described as having "swaggered through the action with radiant singularity of purpose, filling in areas of light and shade that even Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker omitted." – Michael Coveney, Financial Times, April 1983. During this time, Mirren took roles in Caligula (1979), The Long Good Friday (1980)—co-starring with Bob Hoskins in what was her breakthrough film role, Excalibur (1981), 2010 (1984), White Nights (1985), The Mosquito Coast (1986), Pascali's Island (1988) and When the Whales Came (1989). Mirren's television performances include Cousin Bette (1971); As You Like It (1979); Blue Remembered Hills (1979); and The Twilight Zone episode "Dead Woman's Shoes" (1985).
At the beginning of 1989, Mirren co-starred with Bob Peck at the Young Vic in the London premiere of the Arthur Miller double-bill, Two Way Mirror, performances which prompted Miller to remark: "What is so good about English actors is that they are not afraid of the open expression of large emotions. British actors like to speak. In London, there's a much more open-hearted kind of exchange between stage and audience" (interview by Sheridan Morley: The Times 11 January 1989). In Elegy for a Lady she played the svelte proprietress of a classy boutique, while as the blonde hooker in Some Kind of Love Story she was "clad in a Freudian slip and shifting easily from waif-like vulnerability to sexual aggression, giving the role a breathy Monroesque quality".
Mirren's other appearances include The Clearing (2004), Pride (2004), Raising Helen (2004), and Shadowboxer (2005). Mirren also provided the voice for the supercomputer "Deep Thought" in the film adaptation of Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005). Mirren's first film of the 2000s was Joel Hershman's Greenfingers (2000), a comedy based on the true story about the prisoners of HMP Leyhill, a minimum-security prison, who won gardening awards. 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. The project received lukewarm reviews, which suggested that it added "nothing new to this already saturated genre" of British feel-good films. The same year she acted in The Pledge, Sean Penn's third directorial effort, in which she played a child psychologist. A critical success, the ensemble film tanked at the box office. Also that year, she filmed the American-Icelandic satirical drama No Such Thing opposite Sarah Polley. Directed by Hal Hartley, Mirren portrayed a soulless television producer in the film, who strives for sensationalistic stories. It was largely panned by critics.
Mirren's biggest critical and commercial success became Robert Altman's all-star ensemble mystery film Gosford Park (2001). A homage to writer Agatha Christie's whodunit style, the story follows a party of wealthy Britons and an American, and their servants, who gather for a shooting weekend at an English country house, resulting in an unexpected murder. It received multiple awards and nominations, including a second Academy Award nomination and first Screen Actors Guild Award win for Mirren's portrayal of the sternly devoted head servant Mrs. Wilson. Mirren's last film that year was Fred Schepisi's dramedy film Last Orders opposite Michael Caine and Bob Hoskins. In 2003, 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. 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. The film was generally well received by critics, and grossed $96 million worldwide. In addition, the picture earned Satellite, Golden Globe, and European Film Award nominations for Mirren. Her other film that year was the Showtime television film The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone opposite Olivier Martinez, and Anne Bancroft, based on the 1950 novel of the same title by Tennessee Williams.
Mirren's only film of 2014 was the comedy-drama The Hundred-Foot Journey opposite the Indian actor Om Puri. Directed by Lasse Hallström and produced by Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey, the film is based on Richard C. Morais's 2010 novel with the same name and tells the story of a feud between two adjacent restaurants in a French town. Mirren garnered largely positive reviews for her performance of a snobby restaurateur, a role which she accepted as she was keen to play a French character, reflecting her "pathetic attempt at being a French actress." The film earned her another Golden Globe nomination and became a modest commercial success, grossing $88.9 million worldwide.
In 2015, Mirren reunited with her former assistant Simon Curtis on Woman in Gold, co-starring Ryan Reynolds. The film was based on the true story of Jewish refugee Maria Altmann who, together with her young lawyer Randy Schoenberg, fought the Austrian government to be reunited with Gustav Klimt's painting of her aunt, the famous Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I. The film received mixed reviews from critics, although Mirren and Reynold's performances were widely praised. A commercial success, Woman in Gold became one of the highest-grossing specialty films of the year. The same year, Mirren appeared in Gavin Hood's thriller Eye in the Sky (2015), in which she played as a military intelligence officer who leads a secret drone mission to capture a terrorist group living in Nairobi, Kenya. Mirren's last film that year was Jay Roach's biographical drama Trumbo, co-starring Bryan Cranston and Diane Lane. The actor played Hedda Hopper, the famous actress and gossip columnist, in the film, which received generally positive reviews from critics and garnered her a 14th Golden Globe nomination.
Education
Mirren attended St. Bernards High School in Westcliff-on-Sea and later Aberdeen University, though she did not complete her degree. She began her acting career through the National Youth Theatre.
In a 2008 interview with GQ, Mirren said she was date raped as a student, and had often taken cocaine at parties in her twenties and until the 1980s. She stopped using it after reading that Klaus Barbie made a living from cocaine dealing.
