Dame Helen Mirren: I’m quite proud of the fact that I’m still working

Dame Helen Mirren is in Monte-Carlo to accept a prestigious lifetime achievement award. When asked what she is most proud of, the woman with a career spanning more than 50 years says, “Well, I’m quite proud of the fact that I’m still working, which on its own is a bit of a miracle.”

The winner of six Baftas, four Emmys, three Golden Globes, an Oscar, an Olivier and a Tony backtracks a bit as she adds, “I’ve worked my whole life actually and I’ve never had any periods where I was hurting for work because I have always moved between theatre, television and film.

Either I’ve created my career like that or it’s worked out that way, but that has given me a continuity.”

The tireless actress, 72 on Wednesday, currently has several projects in the pipeline. “I’m working a lot and it’s fairly rare for a man or a woman of my age to be working as much as I am,” she says.

Clearly delighted as she prepares to receive the 2017 Monte-Carlo Television Festival Crystal Nymph award for her stellar body of work, Helen is all glammed up and red-carpet ready in a stunning Dolce & Gabbana dress and laughs as she says it is “not too shabby” a place to be.

It’s also not too long a journey from the house she and her husband Taylor Hackford have in Salento, Italy. They also have homes in London and the United States, but the Italian farm, which they have renovated and where they grow pomegranates, is a favourite retreat whenever they’re not working.

“I feel so accepted by the community there,” says the beaming actress. “Of course I’m a tourist and I will always be a tourist there, a foreigner. But at the same time the Salento community in my little town of Tiggiano have accepted my husband and I. We go about our business and our life just as local people. It’s a lovely, lovely experience.”

One of Britain’s most revered actresses, Helen is funnier than you might expect – deadpanning after losing her train of thought. “I’ve forgotten what I was talking about now. Oh yes, talking about me, what else?”

But she is extremely serious about the work that has earned her the Crystal Nymph for her outstanding TV career and hones in on Prime Suspect’s Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison as a personal landmark.

“That show allowed me to move out of being the ‘sexy young thing’ into playing a middle-aged woman,” she says of the drama in which she played a female detective in a very male-dominated police force across seven series from 1991. 

“We forget nowadays, but it as quite revolutionary when that television programme first came out. You’d had female cops on television, like Cagney & Lacey, and I don’t want to take away from that, but it didn’t really have the darkness and the force of Prime Suspect.”

Given that her most recent small-screen credits prior to Prime Suspect had been guest spots on The Twilight Zone and US children’s show Faerie Tale Theatre, plus a long-forgotten TV movie, the spy thriller Red King, White Knight, it is no wonder she relished getting such a meaty role.

“That character was very, very definitive and I was lucky that it fell into my lap,” she confesses. “That was a very important moment and also doing that amount of work in front of the camera taught me about film acting. I always say if I learned about film acting anywhere I learned it on the set of Prime Suspect.”

Helen has made some fun choices since saying goodbye to Jane Tennison in 2006, larking about on Saturday Night Live and, with an Oscar under her belt for The Queen, lending her refined tones to Glee as the inner voice of Down’s syndrome teenager Becky.

“It was a television programme that I loved,” Helen says in explanation of why she signed on for voice-only duties for Glee, “and again it was groundbreaking. It showed young people in a way that was incredibly inclusive. It showed gay characters, it showed disabled characters, and they wanted me to talk like the Queen, which I thought was very funny.

“In her head Becky talked like the Queen, which is why they invited me to be a part of it. So I was very happy to be a part of a show that I really loved and I respected an enormous amount for what it had done for young people who are not the beautiful, young Beverly Hills 90210-looking kind of people.”

Looking back, Helen remembers her younger self as “someone who was romantically and ambitiously dreaming of being an actress but really with very little chance of it ever happening”. 

Born in London’s Hammersmith, she acted in school productions but opted for teacher training college rather than drama school. “I was dreaming of being an actress but I had no idea whether that was ever going to happen,” she recalls.

But at 18 she auditioned for the National Youth Theatre, was snapped up and two years later was starring in Antony And Cleopatra at the Old Vic, had landed an agent and was on her way.

Ambition burned in her. “When you are dreaming your impossible dream, of course you aim high,” Helen says, putting on her poshest accent. “It’s that, ‘I’m going to be the best actress there has ever been, they are going to be amazed by me’ kind of thing.

And you have to have that flame burning in you, especially as an actor, because you meet rejection so much. So someone’s got to believe in you and it might as well be yourself.”Film and TV weren’t really on her radar when she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company.

“I wanted to be a great stage actress so all of my energy and my concentration was going towards theatre,” she says. “I was working very, very hard and suffering and struggling with that because it’s very challenging.

And it was only after about five or six years of working 90 per cent in the theatre that I suddenly realised there was this whole other world of film that I knew nothing about and that I had better start learning about.”

The only way to do that, she realised, was to learn on the job and landed parts in films O Lucky Man!, Caligula, The Long Good Friday and White Nights, the 1985 drama on which she met her director husband Taylor Hackford. He also directed hit movies An Officer And A Gentleman and Against All Odds.

They were a couple for more than a decade before marrying in the Scottish Highlands in 1997.

“If you’re lucky enough to fall in love with someone and for that someone to become your partner then it’s a fantastic state to find yourself in as you progress through life,” Helen says of her 72-year-old husband.

“It was difficult for me at first because I was used to being independent and I didn’t want anybody else’s advice about how to run my life or what to do. So I resisted it.

“But then I came to understand that you’re stronger if there’s two of you and you’ve got someone to bounce your ideas and professional worries off.”

Still in demand, Helen can’t have too many professional worries. She hasn’t acted on TV for a while but, saying how pleased she is with her latest honour, hints she would be up for more small-screen roles.

“I think what’s happening on television is so exciting nowadays,” she says. “The production values are enormous, the writing is really interesting and you can do things on TV that you can’t do in the cinema because you’ve got a longer format, you can tell longer stories, you can develop a character in a far more complex and interesting way.

“I think we’re going through a golden age of television right now, so to be honoured in this way at this particular moment is really great,” she adds.

That said, the actress loves mixing it up across TV, theatre and film.

On the big screen she also enjoys crossing genres, going in recent years from playing Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper in the Trumbo biopic to Jason Statham’s mum in action flick The Fate Of The Furious, the eighth film in the Fast & Furious franchise, and a turn as a struggling thespian in Will Smith drama Collateral Beauty.

Fast & Furious fans may have been surprised to see a British dame in a very American movie, but Helen also appeared in the two RED films (with a rumoured third on the cards) and played a tough military cookie in Eye In The Sky.

“I love action movies and I love being in action movies,” she says. “I’m not so interested in watching them, quite honestly, but I love doing them. It’s such fun on the set of an action movie. First of all, you don’t really have to act, and that’s great. And I’ve always loved the whole technical side of filmmaking. It’s a very complex process and I find it fascinating.”

With the huge box office success of The Fate Of The Furious having secured the green light for a ninth film in the franchise, would Dame Helen sign on to do another one? 

“Absolutely. Sign me up. I’m hoping, on my knees begging, to be in the next Fast & Furious. So we’ll see if they write me in.” 

The Fate Of The Furious will be released on Blu-ray, DVD and digital download later this year.