Dame Helen Mirren has played queens, detectives and Soviet-era matriarchs, won an Oscar and most of the other acting awards going, and is one of the most respected actresses Britain has produced. She is also, by her own cheerful admission, a Marmite lover, to the point of saying she would happily appear in an advert for it. On a brand built around the idea that the country is split down the middle, having a Dame plant her flag that firmly on the love side is the sort of endorsement most brands would pay a fortune for.
Does Helen Mirren like Marmite?
Yes, and without hedging. Mirren has spoken about her love of Marmite in interviews and said she would gladly front a commercial for it. There is no “it’s an acquired taste” diplomacy and no careful pivot to something else. She just likes the stuff, which from someone usually cast as the picture of regal poise is a rather endearing thing to admit.
Who is Helen Mirren?
She was born Ilyena Lydia Mironoff on 26 July 1945 in Hammersmith, London. Her father was Russian and her mother English. Her paternal grandfather had been a colonel and diplomat in the Imperial Russian Army who was stranded in Britain by the 1917 Revolution and ended up driving a cab, and the family anglicised the surname to Mirren in 1951. She grew up in Leigh-on-Sea in Essex, a long way in every sense from the palaces she would later play in.
Helen Mirren’s early career and theatre
Mirren joined the National Youth Theatre as a teenager and made an early mark at twenty playing Cleopatra in “Antony and Cleopatra” at the Old Vic, a performance she has credited with launching her career. She joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966 and spent the 1960s and 1970s building a serious stage reputation, long before the wider public knew her face from television and film.
Helen Mirren’s breakthrough: Prime Suspect
For many British viewers the defining Mirren role is DCI Jane Tennison in the television series “Prime Suspect”, which ran from 1991 to 2006. Her detective fought criminals and the casual sexism of her own force in roughly equal measure, and the part won her a run of BAFTA and Emmy awards. It turned a respected stage and screen actress into a household name.
Helen Mirren as the Queen, and her Oscar
In 2006 Mirren played Queen Elizabeth II in “The Queen”, a performance that won her the Academy Award for Best Actress. For a while she seemed to have a monopoly on playing royalty, having also played Elizabeth I on television around the same time. She was made a Dame in 2003, and is one of the very few performers to have won the major American and British acting honours across film, television and theatre.
Helen Mirren’s notable films and TV at a glance
- Prime Suspect (1991-2006, television) as DCI Jane Tennison
- The Madness of King George (1994)
- Gosford Park (2001)
- The Queen (2006), for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress
- The Last Station (2009)
- Hitchcock (2012)
- The Hundred-Foot Journey (2014)
- Several of the Fast and Furious films, in a later, more playful phase of her career
For all the grandeur of the parts, she is plainly happy to be caught loving something as ordinary and as divisive as a scrape of yeast extract on toast.
