Dame Helen Mirren, DBE (born 26 July 1945) is an English actor. She has won an Academy Award for Best Actress, four SAG Awards, four BAFTAs, three Golden Globes, four Emmy Awards, and two Cannes Film Festival Best Actress Awards.
Mirren was born Helen Lydia Mironoff in Queen Charlotte's Hospital, Chiswick, West London. Her father, Vasiliy Petrovich Mironov (1913–1980), was of Russian origin, and her mother, Kitty (née Kathleen Alexandrina Eva Matilda Rogers; 1909–1996), was English. Mirren's paternal grandfather, Colonel Pyotr Vasilievich Mironov, was in the Tsarist Army and fought in the 1904 Russo-Japanese War. He later became a diplomat, and was negotiating an arms deal in Britain, where he and his family were stranded during the Russian Revolution. The former diplomat became a London cab driver to support his family.
His son, Helen Mirren's father, changed the family name to the Scottish-sounding Mirren in the 1950s and became known as Basil Mirren. He played the viola with the London Philharmonic before World War II, and later drove a cab and was a driving-test examiner, before becoming a civil servant with the Ministry of Transport. Mirren's mother was from West Ham, East London, and was the 13th of 14 children born to a butcher whose father had been the butcher to Queen Victoria. Mirren considers her upbringing to have been "very anti-monarchist".
The first house she remembers living in was in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, when she was two or three years old, after the birth of her younger brother, who was named Peter Basil after his grandfather and great-great-grandfather. Mirren was the second of three children, born two years after her older sister Katherine ("Kate"; born 1942). She later lived in Leigh-on-Sea.
Mirren attended St Bernard's High School for Girls in Southend-on-Sea, where she acted in school productions, and subsequently a teaching college, the New College of Speech and Drama in London, "housed within Anna Pavlova's old home, Ivy House" on the North End Road – which leads from Golders Green to Hampstead, N. London. At age eighteen, she auditioned for the National Youth Theatre and was accepted. By the time she was 20, she was Cleopatra in the NYT production of Antony and Cleopatra at the Old Vic, which led to her signing with the agent Al Parker.
Her work for the NYT led to Mirren joining the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), playing Castiza in Trevor Nunn's 1966 staging of The Revenger's Tragedy, Diana in All's Well That Ends Well in 1967, Cressida in Troilus and Cressida and Phebe in As You Like It in 1968, Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona in 1970, and Tatiana in Gorky's Enemies at the Aldwych and the title role in Miss Julie at The Other Place in 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 1970, Director/producer John Goldschmidt made the documentary film Doing Her Own Thing about Mirren at the Royal Shakespeare Company. The film was made for ATV and shown on the ITV Network in the UK.
In 1972–73, Mirren worked with Peter Brook's International Centre for Theatre Research, and joined the group's tour in North Africa and the US which created The Conference of the Birds. Returning to the RSC she played Lady Macbeth at Stratford in 1974 and at the Aldwych Theatre in 1975.
As reported by Sally Beauman in her 1982 history of the RSC, Mirren, while appearing in Nunn's Macbeth (1974) and in a highly publicised letter to The Guardian newspaper, attacked both the National Theatre and the RSC for their lavish production expenditure, declaring it "unnecessary and destructive to the art of the Theatre," and adding, "The realms of truth, emotion and imagination reached for in acting a great play have become more and more remote, often totally unreachable across an abyss of costume and technicalities..." There were no discernible repercussions for this rebuke of the RSC.
At the Royal Court in September 1975 she notably played rock star Maggie in Teeth 'n' Smiles, a musical play by David Hare, which was revived at Wyndham's Theatre in May 1976 winning her the Plays & Players Best Actress award, voted by the London critics.
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