Helen Mirren



Dame Helen Mirren, DBE, (born 1945) is an Academy Award-winning English actress.

She is known for, among other things, not being shy to shuck her clothes. Like Kate Winslet, she favors characters that are bold and ballsy - much like Mirren herself. Her most famous role to date is the Emmy award-winning DCI Jane Tennison in the long-running, critically acclaimed TV series Prime Suspect.

She is also noted for her exquisite taste in clothes. Everyone forgets this for most of the year, so come awards season the media has a collective asthma attack at how gorgeous her dresses are. Then they do it all again the next year.

She is the only actress in history to have portrayed both Queens Elizabeth - Elizabeth I in the miniseries Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II in The Queen. She won an Emmy for the former and an Oscar for the latter, surprising absolutely nobody.

She is one of the grandes dames of the English stage, alongside Judi Dench and Emma Thompson. Like many of her British cohorts, Mirren put in a stint at the Royal Shakespeare Company.

She shares with Barbara Hershey and Vanessa Redgrave the honour of having received the Cannes Film Festival Prix d'interprétation féminine (their award for Best Actress) twice.

She is of Russian descent, as her grandfather was a Tsarist aristocrat who was stranded in London after the Bolshevik Revolution. Her birth name is Illiana Lydia Petrovna Mironova, which she Anglicised to Helen Mirren. While she does not speak Russian, she is fluent in French.

She is perhaps the greatest example of Grandma, What Massive Hotness You Have! known to man (although she's never had any kids and has, by her own admission, no maternal instincts whatsoever). In 2010's Love Ranch, she became the first major actress to appear nude on film in six different decades (and did a nude-in-the-bathtub photo shoot in New Yorker magazine alongside the film. At age 65!).

Has been married to American director Taylor Hackford since 1997.

Her more important films include:

 * Caligula (1979)
 * Excalibur (1981)
 * 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984)
 * The Cook the Thief His Wife And Her Lover (1989)
 * The Madness of King George (1994)
 * The Prince of Egypt (voice) (1998)
 * Teaching Mrs. Tingle (1999)
 * Gosford Park (2001)
 * The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (voice) (2004)
 * The Queen (2006)
 * National Treasure: Book of Secrets (2007)
 * State of Play (2009)
 * RED (film) (2010)
 * Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole (2010) (voice)
 * The Debt (2011)
 * Arthur (2011)