HALFWAY through a hectic week off ravelling and collecting kudos that began in New York and ended in Dublin, Helen Mirren was in animated conversational form in a 25th floor suite of the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto on Wednesday afternoon. She had spent the previous day doing round table interviews with dozens of north American print journalists and all of Wednesday morning doing one quickie television interview after another after another.
The last television reporter had left and the lighting was still in place, though switched off when we settled down to talk on facing chairs in this temporary television set before she packed her bags for the overnight flight from Toronto to Dublin via London. She was still radiating earnest enthusiasm for her new movie, Some Mother's Son, Terry George's emotional and involving screen dramatisation of the 1981 H Block hunger strikes, in which she plays the central role and also served as the film's co producer.
Some Mother's Son had been rapturously received on its north American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Monday night and Helen Mirren was looking forward, albeit a little anxiously, to the reaction it would get closer to home turf at its Dublin premiere next Thursday.
It probably helped that she clearly was still on a high after winning her first Emmy award - American television's equivalent of the Oscar - in New York on Sunday night, when she was voted best actress in a mini series or special for her gutsy performance as Detective Inspector Jane Tennison in the riveting TV drama Prime Suspect. She dithered about attending the Emmys ceremony. "I almost didn't go, but I decided I should because I'd probably lose," she says. "I've lost twice in the Emmys and I thought if I'm not there, it will look like I'm being lah di dah, or sour grapes. So I thought I should be there and take my medicine one more time. As it turned out, I didn't have to take my medicine!" Surely she's used to winning at this stage, after, for example, the rare achievement of winning best actress at Cannes twice - for Pat O'Connor's Northern Ireland drama, Cal in 1984, and again last year for The Madness of King George. "Yes," she says, "but I've lost on many other nominations." But hasn't she also won several BAFTA awards for Prime Suspect? "I've got three BAFTAs for it," she says proudly. "They look lovely all together. The BAFTA is the prettiest of all the awards. It looks gorgeous and three together look really nice. But I was never particularly attracted to television, even though I had done quite a lot of it and that was my training ground for camera work." Helen Mirren, who turned 50 in July, was born Ilyena Mirnoff, the grand daughter of a white Russian emigre nobleman and the daughter of a driving licence tester, in Leigh on Sea in Essex. To please her family, she attended a teacher's college but pursued her true love, acting, at the National Youth Theatre. At the Old Vie in London in 1965, her performance as Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra earned her excellent reviews and led to her joining the Royal Shakespeare Society.
Her earliest film roles included Michael Powell's Age of Consent, Ken Russell's Savage Messiah, Lindsay Anderson's O Lucky Man, and Celestino Coranado's experimental no budget Hamlet, in which she played both Gertrude and Ophelia. Meanwhile, on stage, she was playing the plum roles - Miss Julie, Cressida, Lady Macbeth, Titania, the Duchess of Malfi - prompting the eminent critic David Thomson to comment in his Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema that "the movies only caught up with Helen Mirren when she was 35 or so".
Would she agree with that view? "I would put it the other way around," she says. "I wasn't interested in the cinema at all until I was in my 30s. I had no desire to work in the cinema. I wanted to be a great stage actress, and I was permanently unsatisfied with the theatre because I didn't feel I was good enough. I was going through a very conscious period of wanting to be a great Shakespearean actress - that was my ambition ever since I was a girl, ever since I wanted to act.
"I had done the odd film, but that was not my interest, my energy or my choice. I had deliberately turned down film roles in order to try and be a better stage actress. You can't do Shakespeare overnight. It requires so much training and becomes such a long journey that it's like becoming an opera singer. It wasn't until I was beginning to feel I had grasped it and could control it on stage - and I wouldn't be arrogant enough as to say that I'd cracked it - that I thought `that's it', that I could look elsewhere and learn about something else. That was the way it happened and I consciously started looking for film work." The 1980s began with Helen Mirren co starring with Bob Hoskins in the gritty London gangland thriller, The Long Good Friday, followed by two movies in Ireland. In 1984 there was Cal, but before that, John Boorman's magical Arthurian adaptation, Excalibur, on the set of which she became close to Liam Neeson, who was making his cinema debut in the film.
When I recall seeing her and him and so many of the Excalibur cast and crew night after night in Sheehan's bar off Grafton Street, she drifts with the memory. "Oh, definitely every night - oh dear, oh dear," she laughs. "They were good times. You know, Sheehans has changed, but I was there quite recently and Dermot was lovely and very welcoming." She pauses. "Ahh... talking about Sheehans, I suddenly felt like I was back there." It was Liam Neeson who first drew her attention to Some Mother's Son, a screenplay by Terry George, who wrote hi the Name of the Father with Jim Sheridan. "Liam told me about Terry, who is a friend of his, and he said Terry had this script I might be interested in," she says. "That was a long time ago, about four years ago, and at that time I wasn't interested in doing it. The peace process wasn't in place and the way the script worked out then, it was more political. "It's still quite political, but I really wanted to make it into a more personal and human story, to show the price ordinary people have to pay for politics. That's the story I wanted rather than one about people becoming political. These ideological decisions are taken and ordinary people are the ones who have to suffer or struggle." In Some Mothers Son Helen Mirren plays a fictitious character, Kathleen Quigley, a widowed middle class teacher and staunch pacifist who has to come to terms with the revelation that her son has secretly been a committed IRA member and that he is prepared to give up his life and join Bobby Sands on the H Block hunger strikes. Her enthusiasm for the project grew to the point where she became a coproducer on it.
THE film has already come under attack in the British media, to which she responds: "I think there are people who don't want to see anything about Northern Ireland on the screen. They don't want the truth or anything hovering around the truth. They don't mind silly films or a fantasy about an IRA hitman played by Brad Pitt on the run in New York. It's interesting that it's truth that's always controversial, whereas people don't mind lies or stupid, silly fantasies. It's when you penetrate the truth of a situation that people get horrified and shocked and want to censor it. It's basically censorship.
"We're trying to get inside the lives of these people, to look at political situations from the inside out, through the eyes of ordinary people who are struggling with their own moral and philosophical dilemmas within that situation. Our movie is not a cut and dried, simplistic movie. It's not about whether the IRA are right or not. That's the back drop, really. Of course, we have to deal with that because we're dealing with the actual reality of Northern Ireland history. We can't betray that, we can't pretend it didn't happen. That's where we chose to place our story." She quotes Bernadette McAliskey. "She put it wonderfully when she said that there were the families who went to war and the families to whom the war came, and we have the perfect example of both families in this film. In the end, what our film is saying is that the things that counted in the past will always count in the future and in the end that is the ultimate human condition - your relationship with your children, your parents, your siblings, and what that means. In that sense, we're all isolated little units." Since completing Some Mother's Son, Helen Mirren has returned to playing the lonely isolated unit that is Detective Inspector Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect, for a four hour special to be broadcast on the ITV network this autumn. "It's about guns," she says. "I wanted it to be about guns and young people in England today".
The bad news is that this will be D.I. Tennison's last outing. "There won't be another Prime Suspect after this one," Helen Mirren says resolutely. "It's not that I feel she's run her course - it's the fact that she hasn't that makes me feel it's time to stop now. I like her because she's a real warts and all character who makes terrible mistakes - certainly not one of those know all characters who always solves everything. But you've got to stop while you are, hopefully, ahead." Looking back over her career, Helen Mirren says that her proudest achievement was the year she spent in the late 1970s touring Africa with the remarkably adventurous theatre director, Peter Brook. "I think getting through a year with Peter Brook was quite an achievement!", she says. "We were travelling through Africa doing experimental theatre with him. That was when I was trying to become a good actress and that was part of my process. I walked away from fame and success and did a year's work in Africa and Paris." Did she come back renewed? "No, I came back confused," she says, "but as time progresses - it was a bit like a time release energy pill - I realised what he had been talking about as I got older and wiser.
Sometimes I would go, `ah, that's what he meant and I didn't understand at the time." In addition to promoting Some Mother's Son in Toronto, Helen Mirren supported the launch of Losing Chase, in which she stars with actor turned director Kevin Bacon. Does she harbour any ambitions to join the legion of actors turning director? "I wouldn't mind," she says. "The only trouble is I'd want to be a great director and I wouldn't be because if I were I would be directing now and I would have been directing since I was 21, instead of acting." Meanwhile, she lives in Los Angeles with director Taylor Hackford, with whom she worked on White Nights in the mid 1980s. "We're constantly planning to work together again, but whether it comes to fruition or not, I don't know," she says. "It's good in a way that we have worked apart, but it would be nice to work together again and we do plan. Scheduling is always difficult, for both of us to find the free time and the subject to happen at one and the same time." Returning on a more frivolous note to Some Mother's Son, I mention the observation of an American journalist who, alter seeing the movie in Toronto this week, remarked, "The British will never make her Dame Helen Mirren now". "Well," she laughs, "I lost that a long time ago." Does she think so? I think so." Why? "Well, I don't know," she says.
"I've always been a bit cheeky."