Helen Mirren returns to TV, happy that her body of work, and not just her body, defines her career. Paul Hoggart interrogates her.

When you tell people that you are going to interview Helen Mirren, I have discovered, the women sound impressed. As for the men (of a certain age, admittedly), their eyes widen and a strange look appears. It is part awe and part as if they have drifted back into some halfforgotten fantasy. They look like startled rabbits caught in a particularly enticing set of headlights. One or two just say, “Wow!” Considering that Mirren is 58, that is quite an achievement. While maintaining an impressive career as one of our finest stage actresses, whose work has included some of the great Shakespearean roles, she has also acquired a reputation as a screen siren. She still appears in those fatuous lists of Britain’s 30 sexiest women. As with Demi Moore and, for that matter, Keith Chegwin, people associate her with appearing on screen nude.
This is despite the fact that the films she has appeared in, which range from "Age of Consent" and "Savage Messiah" via "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover" to "Gosford Park" and, most recently, "Calendar Girls", are almost always models of artistic ambition and integrity.
Yet it is a third strand in this formidable, multifaceted career that has brought her to London from her home in Los Angeles, where she lives with her producer husband, Taylor Hackford, and two stepsons: the sixth outing of "Prime Suspect". The writer Lynda La Plante’s original creation may not exactly be high art and her heroine, Jane Tennison, is not remotely raunchy, having a streak of steely determination and a commitment to her job that borders on ruthlessness. But for the wider British public this is Mirren’s best-known and defining role.
That, in fact, is why she has not done it for seven years. “I thought I might never do it again,” she explains, looking slight, demure and almost spinsterish, in a beautifully cut light grey woollen jacket. “I wanted to distance myself from it ... I thought I was getting too identified with that particular character.”
She had “left a little chink open”, though. “I wouldn’t let them kill me off in the last scene” of "Prime Suspect 5", and Granada had been wooing her to return to one of their most successful dramas for a few years. Several scripts were sent her way and rejected, but with a succession of notable stage and screen roles behind her, she was at least prepared to consider them again.
“Andy (Harries, the executive producer) promised me that he’d find a really great writer, which he did. I was excited about the storyline and the script.”
It is easy to see why. Peter Berry’s "Prime Suspect: The Last Witness" is a dark, powerful piece that outclasses most single dramas that we see these days. Now a Detective Superintendent, Jane Tennison is both more confident of her own abilities and more vulnerable. Her superiors are trying to usher her towards early retirement; a sharp, ambitious young DCI is snapping at her heels and her love-life seems to have evaporated completely.
Where her role in "Calendar Girls" as one of the “down-to-earth, straightforward Yorkshirewomen”, as she describes them, celebrated “how amazingly extraordinary absolutely ordinary people can be”, "Prime Suspect" reminds us, yet again, that women in the police force “have to work twice as hard as men to reach the same position”, and may feel incredibly exposed when they get there.
The background to the story is, she says, “a very brilliant arena”. The murder investigation hinges on events in the former Yugoslavia, although it takes most of the drama’s four gripping hours to unpick and reveal exactly what these were. It plunges us into the shadowy world of the asylum-seekers and illegal immigrants who work extraordinarily long hours, often for incredibly low pay, at those jobs that the rest of us won’t touch.
Though vilified and mistrusted, these people have become vital to our service industries and as casual labour in the building trade. “They move as ghosts among us,” says Mirren. “In fact I wanted the piece to be called ‘Ghosts’ because it’s about the ghost of a crime coming back and as one of the characters says: ‘We’re ghosts. We don’t exist.’
“I love that idea, which I know from the theatre, that you have ‘backstage’ in a hotel. You go out of this environment of glamour and beauty and you’re in this scruffy, dirty, neon-lit ugly little world with peeling paint where extremely low-paid immigrants live and work. I thought that whole theatrical concept was very strong.”
The ghosts of Mirren’s own past may also have played a part in attracting her to the script. Her real name is Ilynea Lydia Mironoff, and she is the granddaughter of a “White” Russian refugee, who brought her father over when he was a toddler. She also has a socialist pedigree and has described herself as “a bit of an old leftie”, but refuses to be drawn into a debate about the media’s attitude to asylum-seekers.
Instead she launches on an anthropological rumination about how humanity is territorial by nature and we have all been migrating and displacing each other for millions of years, and she really doesn’t know if the press are generating hostility to immigrants or just reflecting it.
Even so, it was not an easy decision to return to the role. Revivals can often look desperate, and if they fail, critics and viewers alike can be unforgiving. At first she wondered if she had made a dreadful mistake. “It was like the first day on the set, and there I am putting on what looks like exactly the same costume I wore seven years ago. My heart just dropped and I thought ‘My God! What am I doing? I’m going backwards! It’s terrible!’ I felt really bad for about a week,” she reveals. “Then I saw some of the material that we had shot and I thought: ‘This is going to be great. You’re an idiot. You have one of the greatest roles written for a woman, a great writer and fantastic director, what the hell are you feeling unsure about?’”
Researching the role has given her a huge respect for the police in general and female officers in particular. For this episode she spent time with Sue Akers, commander of the Barnet division of the Met and currently the most senior woman in the force. “I don’t know how they do it. It’s not just the difficulty of the actual job; it’s the environment in which they have to work. The police are on the front line of all the mistakes politicians make. It’s very, very difficult to see that level of pain and struggle and unpleasantness every day. I’m surprised they don’t all retire at 35.”
In the process she has acquired some strange areas of expertise. “I could write a guide book to mortuaries,” she claims (the new drama contains a particularly chilling mortuary scene). “They are surprisingly warm, busy places, and the pathologists all seem to be really pretty young women.”
In this context it doesn’t seem surprising that she gets a little impatient with the inevitable questions about her nude appearances. The idea that "Calendar Girls" was about the allure of the older woman struck her as inappropriate and silly, despite the fact that it is explicit in the script. There is another one in the pipeline, though. She appears briefly naked in a TV film of "The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone", on the bed with Kylie Minogue’s “beautiful” boyfriend Olivier Martinez, “a Frenchman with a sense of humour about himself, which in my experience is quite rare”.
Perhaps part of Mirren’s air of reserve comes from the feeling that she was sexually used in her youth. The same afternoon that I was asking her if it was she who appeared as a naked Helen of Troy in the 1964 RSC production of "Dr. Faustus" (I had in fact misremembered; it wasn’t), she was telling another journalist about the abusive treatment she received from men as a young woman. Ouch.
She is ambivalent, too, about becoming a Dame in December. “I will never get used to it,” she says, “It’s not sitting comfortably on my shoulders at the moment. I’m terribly, terribly proud, ridiculously proud. I just have this feeling that I don’t deserve it and it’s a mistake.”
If that seems confused, even paradoxical, it probably is. But then Dame Helen Mirren is a most unusual blend of qualities – sensuality and reserve, intelligence, diplomacy and unnerving directness. Which is why we continue to watch her so avidly.

Submitted by Juliet