Command Performance (original) (raw)

Although she has described her younger self as “totally and ridiculously inhibited,” Mirren found that she could be bolder in role-playing than she was in life. “All I knew was that I really loved it,” she said. “It was something I was good at without having to work too hard—or, at least, it was work I wanted to do.” “I want to be the Sarah Bernhardt of my generation,” she confided to her sister. Her parents weren’t pleased. “Don’t be ridiculous,” her mother said. “People like us aren’t actors.” There was no money for drama school, and Mirren grudgingly followed her sister on a scholarship to a teachers’ training college in London. Nonetheless, without telling her parents—“I didn’t want to fail publicly,” she said—she successfully auditioned for the National Youth Theatre. Mirren was eighteen; by twenty, she was selling out the Old Vic.

Last July, I joined Mirren and Hackford for their annual trip to Del Mar, in San Diego, for some horse racing: the sport of kings—and, apparently, of sometime queens. The track is two hours by train from downtown Los Angeles. On the way to the station, Hackford stopped to buy the Daily Racing Form at a newsstand on Hollywood Boulevard. When he got back in the car, he was pointing to the vender, a woman in sunglasses and a straw fedora behind a wall of magazines. “A classic Hollywood look,” he said to Mirren, who sat in the back seat with her cap of white hair still damp from the morning’s shower. “Did you see the lady with the nails? She’s got these long nails; every one is a different color.” Hackford is tall and thin, with a distinguished white beard and the rumpled nonchalance of a teacher. By nature, he is a doer and an explainer, a take-charge guy who answers to the nickname Jefe and whose knowledge is imparted with brio and the occasional sizzle of impatience. His curiosity has led him over the years from the Peace Corps to television investigative journalism and documentary filmmaking and, finally, to feature films. (He won an Oscar in 1979 for “Teenage Father,” a short; he was nominated again in 2005, for “Ray.”) Although he shares with Mirren a working-class background, he does not share her metabolism. Hackford churns up the water around him; Mirren considers herself “a slug.” “I always wanted to be Pierre Bonnard’s wife,” she said. “Lie around, have baths, be painted constantly as a young person surrounded by beautiful flowers and satin gowns.” At the train terminal, Hackford headed off at a trot. “O.K., babe, we’re gonna have to hoof it,” he said.

Mirren met Hackford in 1984, when she went to audition for “White Nights,” which he directed. He was twenty minutes late. “I was very angry,” she said. “I was sort of rude.” Hackford told the London Times, “I apologized but there was a cold disdain from her. I tried to make small talk and she said, ‘Are we going to read?’ She was smoking, man! Then she asked if there was anything else, and boom, she was out of there.” Mirren and Hackford moved into their Los Angeles aerie in 1986, and were married in 1997—she for the first time, at the age of fifty-two, he for the third, at fifty-three. (Hackford has two children from his previous marriages; Mirren has none.) “He wasn’t like anyone I’d ever been with,” Mirren said, once we were safely on the train and Hackford had been dispatched to the rear of the top deck to study the nags. “Much more edgy but also much more exciting, more driven. He still surprises me after however many years. He’s incredibly free as a person and he lets me be free. The other thing I’ve always loved is that he treats women with equality, without even thinking about it. He just looks women in the eye and takes their human value. That’s so un-Hollywood.” She added, “He can be very, very difficult.”

A leader onstage, at home Mirren seems happy to be led. “Let’s face it,” she told Barney Reisz, one of the producers of “Elizabeth I,” while discussing possible actors for one of the leads. “Every woman likes a man who makes a decision, doesn’t she?” “She’s always been wifely in all her relationships,” Kate told me. “She’s much more ‘Well, if that’s what you want, darling, we’ll do it.’ ” To me, Mirren explained, “I have to say, without sounding like a total tosser, that everything I’ve learned in life, and that has taken me out of my natural interior life, has been with men. They exposed me to things that I wasn’t aware of. I learned from all the guys.” The main relationships to which Mirren was referring were with the actors Kenneth Cranham, Bruce Myers, and Liam Neeson, the photographer James Wedge, and Prince George Galitzine. Onstage and off, Mirren has been defined by her intelligence; however, she still professes to “feeling rather stupid,” a sense of deficit that, incidentally, makes her a good audience. She listens, she adds to the thought, and she also wants to be told. She glanced out the window of the train. “There is that awful moment when you realize that you’re falling in love,” she said. “That should be the most joyful moment, and actually it’s not. It’s always a moment that’s full of fear because you know, as night follows day, the joy is going to rapidly be followed by some pain or other. All the angst of a relationship. You go, ‘Oh, no. Please, no.’ You go, ‘Yes, I’m in love. No, I’m in love.’ ”

She settled back in her seat, as the train sped past a beachfront amusement park. “I’ve always had that slight attraction to the fairground, the circus, the tattooed,” she said. As a teen-ager, Mirren worked as a shill for rides at a local Southend amusement park. “The boys who did the Dodge ’Ems, with their dirty T-shirts and their leather jackets. I never liked the clean guys. I liked the slightly dirty kinds.” From the outset of her career, Mirren made a legend of her daring, which included a certain sexual brazenness. “She was like a Rubens in bluejeans,” Cranham said. In 1968, as Cressida in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s “Troilus and Cressida,” she spun almost naked across the stage, and was soon dubbed by the British broadsheets “the Sex Queen of Stratford.” “I never wriggled out of that,” Mirren said. Over the years, she has both condemned and parlayed the idea of herself as a sex symbol. “I have traded on it,” she told the Independent in 2001. “I do the tousled thing from time to time. . . . I can do the dirty thing. . . . But at some point you decide enough of that, I had better move on.” To me, she explained, “I think for a long time it was very hard for people to see past my physical outward appearance. I was a blond girl with big tits. I hated that image. It was so uncomfortable for me, and distasteful.” Nonetheless, when Mirren auditioned for the R.S.C., in 1967, Trevor Nunn, then a director with the company, recalled, “A girl came out who appeared to be wearing a garment constructed of black string. It had more spaces between it than it covered. Conversation stopped completely. Jaws dropped. We saw from her C.V. that she’d had no professional experience. She was passionate about doing classical work. I make no bones about it—I think the red blood cells and testosterone were up a considerable level. I don’t think anybody contemplated for a moment that she should be told to go away and get experience somewhere else.” Nunn added, “We were looking at a major leading player after she’d been with the company a couple of years.”

In 1972, Mirren interrupted her R.S.C. career to join the director Peter Brook’s experimental theatre company on a yearlong international tour, which included three months in African villages—what she called “a voyage into the unknown.” In “Conference of the Birds: The Story of Peter Brook in Africa,” the critic John Heilpern describes Mirren—the last actor to join the troupe—this way: “Helen Mirren, twenty-six, a star perhaps, outspoken, generous, bright, luscious, lost.” He continues, “Part of her dilemma might be that she couldn’t decide whether to be a classical actress or a Hollywood movie star. You can’t have both apparently. The Brook experiment was entangled with her search for an answer.” According to Mirren, her goal in joining Brook was “to liberate myself.” Although nudity was not difficult for her—she has bared all in several films, from her first, “Age of Consent” (1969), to “Calendar Girls” (2003), and, at fifty, she posed naked for the cover of Britain’s _Radio Times_—she felt weighted down by a sense of physical embarrassment. “I’ve always been battling against my sense of dignity and refinement,” she said. “I was embarrassed by any bodily functions when I was younger. I could never even blow my nose. When I went out on dates as a girl, I could never say, ‘Excuse me, I want to go to the ladies’.’ That’s why I got a reputation for refusing to kiss anyone at the gate. By the time I got to the gate, I was always dying to go to the loo.”

This conflict between inhibition and exhibition has had a bearing on all aspects of Mirren’s performing. “I think a lot of my life, and especially my work life, has been spent learning how to be brave,” she said. Her sex appeal seems to reside not in her cleavage but in her emotional availability, her complicated combination of hauteur, courage, and empathy. “Helen doesn’t say, ‘Please love me. Look, I’ll smile nicely, and you’ll love me,’ ” Frears told me. “She’s not inviting you in the way other actresses often are. She just says, ‘This is what it’s like,’ and that’s what you love about her. She confronts something, and she doesn’t sentimentalize it.” “She goes for life,” Jeremy Irons, who co-starred with Mirren in “Elizabeth I,” said. “That’s why she’s alluring to men. She is the complete antithesis of the vapid.”

Mirren’s reputation for wildness owes much to the vividness of her early performances. In the mid-seventies, she followed a sinister and seductive Lady Macbeth (“I really do regret that Shakespeare never knew Miss Mirren,” Harold Hobson wrote in the London Sunday Times) with a breakout appearance as the drunk and disorderly rock singer Maggie Frisby in David Hare’s 1975 “Teeth ’n’ Smiles,” the first and best British play about the barbarity of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. “It was such a great role,” she said. “Your first entrance is being carried across the stage over someone’s shoulder, completely drunk. Everyone’s been talking about you for the last twenty minutes, anyway. It was fabulous.” Mirren, who had to belt out a number of songs, couldn’t carry a note. “I am profoundly unmusical,” she said. “But I learned this amazing thing. If you’ve got the chutzpah, you can persuade the audience of anything.”

The same year, at the first read-through for Lindsay Anderson’s revival of “The Seagull,” in which Mirren gave an acclaimed performance as Nina, opposite Joan Plowright’s Arkadina, the cast was sitting around after deconstructing the first act, when Mirren said, “I wonder if Nina and Trigorin ever have an affair.” “Joan looked at me,” she said. “ ‘Helen?’—her little brown eyes beadily looking at me. ‘Have you read the play?’ I realized I’d made the most appalling gaffe. I’d just heard that it was a great role. Joan was in it. Lindsay was directing. Of course I said yes. But I’m terribly lazy. I find it very hard to read plays. I find it hard to understand who’s who and where they’re supposed to be. I get utterly confused.”

Mirren’s legend of her own laziness (one that is easily belied by a quick glance at her résumé, with its forty-five films and thirty stage roles) is not, it seems, a pretension but a sort of psychological self-defense—a way of protecting the impulsive, childlike part of herself and her imagination. Describing “Composition VII” by Wassily Kandinsky, her favorite painter, she said, “Color, form, the appearance of improvisation: in fact, it’s intensely, beautifully worked out.” She could easily have been talking about her own acting. Of all her theatrical influences, Mirren claims the painter Francis Bacon as her “great guru.” Citing the book “Interviews with Francis Bacon,” she said, “You have to learn technique. He describes how painful the process is. How you feel paralyzed, restricted, frustrated by it. You feel like you lost your early instinctive inspiration. You have to learn it to forget it.” She went on, “Sometimes you just can’t get there. Other times, you’re there without thinking.” In Adrian Noble’s 1982 Stratford production of “Antony and Cleopatra,” in which she starred opposite Michael Gambon, Mirren felt that she’d reached the pinnacle of “making it live anew almost every night.” When she didn’t win the Laurence Olivier Award for her performance, she left the country. “I thought, Fuck it, that’s it, they obviously don’t want me,” she said, in Ivan Waterman’s 2003 book “Helen Mirren: The Biography.” “They don’t like me. They hate what I do. I’ll go somewhere else. I wasn’t being asked to do any work in England. Suddenly, Hollywood was a way of saying, ‘Fuck you, England.’ ”

Mirren wasn’t immediately happy in California. “I felt like a fish out of water,” she said. “I was invisible, and really lost my identity as a British theatre actress.” In film, she claims to have felt for a long time like “a rabbit in the headlights.” Her technical breakthrough came on Peter Weir’s “The Mosquito Coast,” in 1986. “I was working with a lot of children and I thought, I’m just gonna use this experience to make myself feel free,” she said. “I’m not gonna worry where the camera is. Of course, it drove Peter Weir around the twist, because I was always wandering out of shot. My desire was to learn not to care about the camera.” Mirren added, “That’s where your technique, as Francis Bacon says, supports you. You don’t even think about it anymore. You recognize the good accident. You allow the accident to happen.” For one scene in Nicholas Hytner’s “The Madness of King George,” Mirren—as the loving consort to the King (Nigel Hawthorne), Queen Charlotte—was sitting on the edge of George’s bed, laughing about the events of the day. “In the middle of the take, Helen suddenly ducked down and bit his belly,” Hytner recalled. “The cameraman was there, and it’s in the film. She just went for it. He loved it. You know—if you’re the director—that that’s going to pay dividends right through the film: a moment that just says how necessary they are for each other. So that, when you rip them apart, it’s heartbreaking.” Hytner added, “Helen immediately identified that woman’s unconditional love for her husband, her physical ease with him. Of the actors I know, she is the one for whom the emotion love is most easily coupled with physical desire. That was a kind of revelation. It became the heart of the film.”

We were well past San Clemente before anybody on the train took notice of Mirren. Then the conductor—a short bleached-blond woman named Marcie, with a nose ring and a tattoo on her wrist—asked if it was O.K. to take a photograph. “That’d be fine,” Mirren said. Marcie handed me her camera phone and slid in beside Mirren, who promptly took off Marcie’s blue Amtrak cap and put it on her own head. They leaned in close. I snapped the picture and held the viewfinder up for Mirren’s inspection. “It’s not very good,” she said. “Make sure we’re in the center.” The second shot worked. “I love your hat,” Mirren said. “It’s done a few miles, hasn’t it?”

At the track, Hackford explained his system for betting—a complicated equation of running times, track conditions, jockeys, trainers’ and owners’ rankings, horses’ earnings, and claiming prices. He favored the quinella—a wager that required picking the first- and second-place horses, which had a bonanza payout if you hit it. “It’s almost impossible to win,” he said, “but, when you do, you feel like a god.”

“Taylor and I live a very parsimonious life,” said Mirren, who, according to her sister, could “use a tea bag twice.” In L.A., she rents an economy car; except for the occasional gourmet birthday treat, she said, “I go for cheap.” As she stood at the betting window for the first race, her tightfistedness was apparent. “I’m a two-dollar bettor, so there’s no gain, but also no pain,” she said. She put her money on Lockitup. The horse promptly romped first around the six furlongs and earned her almost seven dollars, paying for her next bet. By the third race, all her lessons forgotten, Mirren was flying blind. “I bet what the guy in front bet,” she said. The fourth race featured a six-to-one shot called Royal Cheer, which she resisted. By the seventh race, a certain wistfulness had crept into her excitement. “Oh, God, here we go,” she said to Hackford, as the horses were being eased into their gates. “I arrived with such optimism. Can I borrow your glasses?” Hackford, already bent over his calculations for the next race, handed her his binoculars without looking up. The race began. Mirren stood with the field glasses trained in the direction of her horse, a ten-to-one shot. “Take off the end, baby,” Hackford said. Mirren glanced quizzically at him, then at the binoculars; the lens caps were still on. Mirren’s horse finished third. “I won nine dollars on the last bet, Tay,” she said, when she returned from the betting window. “Because I’m doing it across the board.” “Good luck, baby,” Hackford, who was not having much success, said. “Really, really good luck.” In the ninth race, Hackford finally won the quinella.

On the way back from the track, Mirren sat by herself as the train sped along the Pacific shoreline, past bonfires, waving children, surfers bobbing like seals on the glistening swells. The sun dipped below the horizon and cast a tangerine glow against the sky. “Incredible sunset,” she said. “Glorious.” After a while, she added, “The ease of American life. The blessing.”

Mirren’s London home is a former customs house, near Tower Bridge, on the cobbled backstreets of East London. Her front door looks out over a communal garden—the southeast corner is allotted to her peonies—that is the only garden on the Thames; in the days of sailing ships, it was a loch that led to an inland cove. All that remains from that era are a few black steel pylons along the edge of the greensward, where the big ships used to tie up. Mirren loves this garden and the sense of community with her fellow-gardeners. The gardening of her private space, however, sometimes requires some prompting. There is a large note fixed to her kitchen window: “Don’t Forget to Water Me! I’m outside this window!”

On a glistening early-August morning, in a blue-and-white striped boatneck jersey, bluejeans, and espadrilles, she headed off to a small basement dubbing studio on Wardour Street, in Soho, for a looping session, one of her last days of work as “Prime Suspect” ’s Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison. “You can’t go on,” Mirren said, explaining her decision to end the series. “I think I’ve gone on probably too long anyway.”

“Prime Suspect” was the first British police procedural to put a woman’s professional and psychological life squarely center stage. Over the years, Mirren had often complained publicly of the paucity of great female roles. “There isn’t a ‘King Lear’ for women, or a ‘Henry V’ or a ‘Richard III,’ ” she said. “Prime Suspect” was a far cry from Shakespeare; nonetheless, her translation of the part into something iconic had to do with her Shakespearean expertise—her ability to transform herself into people who, as Hytner pointed out, “are larger than life, speak better than life, feel more deeply than life.” He added, “She can take someone like Jane Tennison and speak for a whole generation.”

“Prime Suspect” introduced Mirren to a wider American public; in England, where it attracted more than fourteen million viewers, the show also reintroduced her to the British public, from whom she’d been absent during her California years. (“Helen is the Queen in exile,” Adrian Noble said.) Before “Prime Suspect,” female detective shows (“Dempsey and Makepeace” in the U.K.; “Cagney & Lacey” in the U.S.) had aped the male action formulas. “Prime Suspect” ’s creator, Lynda La Plante, looked scrupulously at psychology and criminology and took her story into new areas of sexual politics as well as of crime detection. In the series, many professional women found a metaphor for their frustration. “They had put up with it for twenty years and none of them had been able to complain publicly about anything because it would have been the death of their careers,” Mirren told the press. “Suddenly, there on the screen was a woman who was saying, ‘Screw you.’ A yell went up from all the women in all the professions, saying, ‘Yes, that’s exactly what it’s like.’ ” So far, “Prime Suspect” has won twenty-seven awards, including three Emmys for best miniseries and one, in 1996, for its star.

Mirren was the only actress to whom the producers of the series offered the part, back in 1991. Aspects of her emotional profile made her a natural fit for Tennison. Both were smart, independent, and ambitious; both were feminists who liked the company of men; both were Bolshie victims and survivors of the era’s sexual politics. “Women are taught to smile, to be pleasant, to be charming, to be attractive. To say things like ‘You’re a darling—thank you so much.’ They get their way like that,” Mirren told reporters. “Tennison doesn’t do that. She is driven, obsessive, vulnerable, unpleasantly egotistical, and confused. But she is damn good at what she does and is totally dedicated.” To me, Mirren explained, “Jane’s really weird for me, because I never think about her, not for one second. Of all the characters I’ve ever played, Jane is the one I’ve most allowed just to be. I walk out on the set and let it happen.”