She’s a four-time Oscar nominee and a Dame to boot but, unlike her latest movie character, Helen Mirren really isn’t so scary. The star, who grew up in Leigh,  gives Susan Griffin a lesson on life.

 

Dame Helen Mirren is one of those women who appear unflappable, but she’d like put the record straight and announce it’s all bravado.

“The good thing is to pretend you’re not frightened, just act,” she says.

That’s easy enough for an Oscar winner to say, but the 67-year-old actress is having none of it.

“You get on with it,” she adds, shrugging. “You go, ‘OK, I’m frightened but it’s not the end of the world and it’s my business and my fear and I’ll just deal with it’. It’s just being practical.”

Mirren was given an early lesson when she was summoned to see her headmistress of St Bernard’s High School for Girls in Westcliff. “She was a Bernardine nun, dressed in black and white, and I was so frightened of her,” recalls Mirren, looking elegant in a green maxi dress and white floral print cardigan. “But she also gave me great advice. She said, ‘The only thing to fear is fear itself’.”

Fear plays a big part in her latest movie, Monsters University, and it was her former headmistress whom Mirren looked to for inspiration when creating the character of Dean Hardscrabble. “She was scary, but kind and wise underneath,” she explains.

While it’s not the first time Mirren has voiced an animated character, the movie does mark her debut as a giant centipede, and she credits the movie’s director Dan Scanlon for helping her hone the character.

“I’m actually hopeless at voiceovers,” she insists. “I would’ve loved to have been in the room with Billy and John and watched the masters at work, but at least I had Dan helping me.”

Looking back on her career, Mirren admits at times it’s felt like a “hard slog”.

Born Ilyena Lydia Vasilievna Mironoff to a Russian immigrant father and an East End mother, Mirren dreamed of stardom from a young age.

“I remember being absolutely sure a big producer would drive past with a cigar and lean out of the window and say: ‘You’re the one I’ve been looking for!’ Of course it never happens like that.”

Instead, aged 17, Mirren joined the National Youth Theatre and later the Royal Shakespeare Company, before beginning her film career with Michael Powell’s Age Of Consent.

Early on in her career, she was working with some of the biggest names in the industry, and remembers feelings of anxiety.

“There were certain actors when I was young who were quite intimidating,” she says. “They probably didn’t mean to be, but when I came into the acting profession, it was quite hierarchical, you know? You didn’t sit at the same table as the lead actor,” she adds, resting her hand under chin.

“It was coming out of the 1950s, Sir Laurence Olivier type of actors, and these were very powerful people and it was quite scary,” she adds.

Not one for false modesty, Mirren acknowledges that people undoubtedly put her on the very same pedestal now.

“Maybe other people now look at me and go, ‘Oh, she’s so scary’, but you really don’t want to feel you are. It’s not what you’re trying to be,” she says.

It’s something she was acutely aware of when she received her damehood in 2003.

“I was quite worried about accepting the honour for that reason,” she says. “I don’t want to be set apart in any way.”