Dame Helen Mirren DBE (born Helen Lydia Mironoff,[4] 26 July 1945) is an English actor. She is the recipient of numerous accolades and is the only performer to have achieved both the American and the British Triple Crowns of Acting. Mirren has received an Academy Award and a BAFTA Award for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen, a Tony Award and a Laurence Olivier Award for portraying the same character in The Audience, as well as three British Academy Television Awards and four Primetime Emmy Awards for her role as DCI Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect.
Mirren’s stage performance as Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra at the National Youth Theatre in 1965 provided her an opportunity to join the Royal Shakespeare Company, before making her West End stage debut in 1975. She subsequently went on to achieve success in film and television, appearing in films such as The Madness of King George (1994), Gosford Park (2001), and The Last Station (2009), receiving Academy Award nominations for each of those performances. For her role on Prime Suspect, which ran from 1991 to 2006, she won three consecutive British Academy Television Awards for Best Actress (1992, 1993 and 1994)—a record of consecutive wins shared with Dame Julie Walters—and two Primetime Emmy Awards.[5] She played Queen Elizabeth I in the television series Elizabeth I (2005), and Queen Elizabeth II in the film The Queen (2006); she is the only actor to have portrayed both of the regnant Elizabeths on screen.[6]
After her breakthrough role in The Long Good Friday (1980), Mirren appeared in a variety of other films including Cal (1984), for which she won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress, 2010 (1984), The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), Teaching Mrs. Tingle (1999), Calendar Girls (2003), The Tempest (2010), The Debt (2010), Hitchcock (2012), The Hundred-Foot Journey (2014), Woman in Gold (2015), Eye in the Sky (2015), Trumbo (2015), and The Leisure Seeker (2017). She has also appeared in several action films such as Red (2010) and its sequel Red 2 (2013), as well as in the Fast & Furious film franchise The Fate of the Furious (2017), Hobbs & Shaw (2019), F9 (2021), and Fast X (2023).
In the Queen’s 2003 Birthday Honours, Mirren was appointed a Dame (DBE) for services to drama, with investiture taking place at Buckingham Palace.[7][8] She has received numerous honours including a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2013,[9] the BAFTA Fellowship for lifetime achievement in 2014,[10] and Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 2022.[11]
Early life and ancestry
Mirren was born Helen Lydia Mironoff on 26 July 1945[12][13] at Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospital in the Hammersmith district of London,[14][15] to an English mother and Russian father.[16] 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.[16][17] Mirren’s father, Vasily Petrovich Mironoff (1913–1980), was a member of an exiled family of the Russian nobility; he was taken to England when he was two by his father, Pyotr Vasilievich Mironov.[16] Pyotr Mironov, who owned a family estate near Gzhatsk (now Gagarin), was part of the Russian aristocracy. His mother, Mirren’s great-grandmother, was Countess Lydia Andreevna Kamenskaya, an aristocrat and a descendant of Count Mikhail Fedotovich Kamensky, a prominent Russian general in the Napoleonic Wars.[13][18] Pyotr Mironov served as a colonel in the Imperial Russian Army and fought in the 1904 Russo-Japanese War. He became a diplomat and was negotiating an arms deal in Britain when he and his family were stranded by the Russian Revolution in 1917.[19][20] He settled in England and became a London cab driver to support his family.[21]
Vasily Mironoff also played the viola with the London Philharmonic Orchestra before World War II.[16] He was an ambulance driver during the war, and served in the East End of London during the Blitz.[22] He and Kathleen Rogers married in Hammersmith in 1938, and at some point before 1951 he anglicised his first name to Basil.[23] 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.[12][16] In 1951, he changed the family name to Mirren by deed poll.[23] Mirren considers her upbringing to have been “very anti-monarchist”.[24] 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).[25] Her paternal cousin was Tania Mallet, a model and Bond girl.[26] Mirren was brought up in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex.[27]
Mirren attended Hamlet Court primary school in Westcliff-on-Sea, where she had the lead role in a school production of Hansel and Gretel,[28][29] 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.[30][31]
