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The Queen (2006)
elen Mirren’s first BAFTA nomination was exactly 30 years ago, for her role as a tragic young Catholic widow in Cal (1984), set during the Irish Troubles of the early 1980s. Ten BAFTA nominations and four wins on – including three on the spin for her feisty, acerbic DCI Jane Tennison in ITV’s Prime Suspect – Mirren, now Dame Helen, has become a national treasure. If the “rough, messed up” (her words) Scotland Yard cop fi rst defi ned her screen image internationally, then that would change even more spectacularly a decade later when she gained even greater global popularity, kudos and many more awards playing our reigning monarch on the big screen in The Queen (2006). It’s clear, however, that the award this year of BAFTA’s prestigious Fellowship – she’s only the 10th woman in the Academy’s entire history to receive it – has an extra special meaning for her. “I think,” she mused, “we all know that winning awards for performance is a bit of a questionable process. The first thing you tend to feel when you win an award is guilt because you know how the other people who are up for it feel as you’ve been there yourself. This is very different, a recognition, hopefully, of a body of work, a lifetime of a certain attitude and approach to work. That’s how I see it. It’s not, for a change, about being the ‘best’ of anything, as it were, and I really like that.” And, she laughed, “it really has been a lifetime, rather terrifying to realise that,” before reflecting more closely on a remarkable stage and screen career across almost half a century, which fi rst sprang to life from the mid-1960s when she became a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, taking on over the succeeding years some great classical and contemporary roles. “My overriding ambition from a young age,” recalled the London-born daughter of AngloRussian parentage, “was to be in the theatre. I was so caught up in the romantic fantasy of those great actresses of the late 19th century, like Eleonora Duse and Sarah Bernhardt. They were part of my romantic vision. Above all, I wanted to be a great classical theatre actress, and that’s what I worked towards from the very start.”