Mirren, Dame Helen

▪ British actress

original name  Ilynea Lydia Mironoff 

born July 26, 1945, London, Eng.

 

 British actress especially known for her role as Detective Jane Tennison on the television series Prime Suspect (1991–96, 2003, 2006) and for her subtle and sympathetic portrayal of Elizabeth II in The Queen (2006), for which she won an Academy Award.

      Mirren was born in London of a Russian-born father and a Scottish mother. (The family's last name was Mironoff until Helen's father decided to anglicize it when she was 10.) She joined Britain's National Youth Theatre at age 18 and the Royal Shakespeare Company a year later. She spent a large part of the next 15 years working with the latter, appearing in such roles as Cressida in Troilus and Cressida and Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra. While still starring in theatre productions, Mirren began her film career in her early 20s. Her first film to be released was A Midsummer Night's Dream (1968), which was followed by dozens of others, including the English gangster movie The Long Good Friday (1980); the King Arthur spoof Excalibur (1981); and the love story set in Northern Ireland Cal (1984), for which she won the best actress award at the Cannes film festival. Mirren later played the unfaithful wife of a grotesque English thief in the controversial The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (1989) and Queen Charlotte in The Madness of King George (1994), a role for which she was nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar. In 1997 she married director Taylor Hackford. Two years later she appeared as the title character in The Passion of Ayn Rand.

      Mirren continued her successful film career into the 21st century. She was nominated for her second best supporting actress Oscar for her role as an English housekeeper in Robert Altman (Altman, Robert)'s Gosford Park (2001). In Calendar Girls (2003), she played a middle-aged Yorkshire woman who convinces her friends to pose nude for a calendar benefiting leukemia research. Mirren won both a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award and an Academy Award for best actress for The Queen (2006), a fictionalized account of the ineffectual response of Elizabeth II to the untimely death of Diana, princess of Wales, in 1997.

      In addition to her screen work, Mirren also starred in various television roles. Her most notable performance was as Jane Tennison, a tough detective constantly under pressure to prove that she can succeed in a traditionally male field, in the BBC television series Prime Suspect. The show aired for seven seasons and earned her BAFTA awards in 1992, 1993, and 1994. She also won an Emmy for her performance in the television miniseries Elizabeth I (2005). Mirren was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 2003.

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