“I’m still the good girl who wants to be a bad girl…”
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| Photographs by Juergen Teller. Hair and Makeup by Neil Young/Carol Hayes Management |
Most all that getting sanctioned by authority, settling down and doing the right things-well, I can’t say it appeals much, ” Helen Mirren once believed to a reporter. “What I really fancy is getting a bit notorious …
It was year 1974, and she was a 29-year-old actress teasing the journalist much as she'd the press and audiences for the next 36 years. Mirren was then a increasing star at the Royal Shakespeare Company-luridly dubbed “Stratford’s very own sex queen” through one paper. It was long before the authorities sanctioned her with a pile associated with awards (including an Oscar for The Queen), and before the Internet made the girl a viral phenom thanks to bodacious paparazzi shots of her cavorting within a bikini. At the age of 62. And guess what? She had it both methods: She got her notoriety and the fusty accolades.
“I am a little well known, ” Mirren remarks, still teasing. She says nearly everything with a mischievous spark, like a naughty teenager appending “ … in bed” to the end of every phrase. The actress, who turns 65 next month, is elegantly attired in light rose and silver, her delicate hands (the nails tinted a matching pearlescent rose) constantly buttoning and unbuttoning her cardigan. It’s probably not meant flirtatiously, but with Mirren, every action can feel like a seduction. Perhaps it’s the little, black Native American tattoo on her left hand (the result, she says, of a outrageous, drunken night in Minnesota), her subtle finger to propriety. “It’s strange when your life becomes vintage, like a period movie, ” she says half-seriously. “I’m getting less notorious as I get older. People forget that I ever was. ”
Her latest role, not to mention the Juergen Teller photos attending this article, ought to help remind everyone. After a raft of prestigious parts and three Oscar cession in the last decade, Mirren signed up to play Grace Botempo, the madam of a flourishing seventies Reno whorehouse in her husband Taylor Hackford’s film Love Farm, opening June 30. (The film, based on Nevada’s real Mustang Ranch, is actually scripted and produced by New York contributing editor Mark Jacobson. ) For years, Hackford, whom she married in 1997, has asked her to play smaller components in his films. “And I said ‘Oh, for God’s sake! Of course I am not going to do that! ’ ” says Mirren. “They were never interesting sufficient parts, and I wasn’t going to do it just because he was directing it. ”
Fascinating is probably underselling Grace. Diagnosed with cancer and frustrated with an epically sleazy spouse (Joe Pesci), Mirren’s madam begins a hot love affair with a beefy fighter 30 years her junior, played with abundant smolder by Spanish newcomer Sergio Peris-Mencheta. “He’s got a fabulous big-animal thing in that sort of raw, brutish, ugly-beautiful method, ” says Mirren, who shares a steamy, and, because it’s the girl, entirely plausible love scene with Peris-Mencheta. In addition , she makes dick humor, stomps on the throat of a misbehaving prostitute, and presides over the brothel along with such swagger that Pesci shouts, “Who do ya think you are, the actual queen of fuckin’ England? ” Well, yes.
In another of her very first interviews, Mirren was quoted as saying, “I’m a would-be rebel-the great girl who’d like to be a bad one. ” She says she continues, planned, to be the good Catholic schoolgirl named Ilyena Vasilievna Mironov, who grew up within Essex, England, with a Russian father and an English mother. “It’s true! We haven’t grown out of that, have I? ” she says, laughing. “I’m nevertheless the good girl who wants to be a bad girl. But I’ll never make it like a bad girl … I’m not a prude or a moralist and I never have already been, but I’m too fearful, too much of a wimp, really. ” When the girl husband tried to convince her to spend a night at the Mustang Ranch, Mirren refused. “I said, ‘Read my lips: I’m not going to spend the night in a brothel. ’ ” In the end, she dispensed with research and simply required direction. “It’s amazing how quickly you get into dildos everywhere and pink-feather handcuffs. Within an hour you’re completely used to it. ”
Mirren believes that brothels should be legalized because its safer for the sex workers. But she’s additionally loathe to romanticize working girls: “Susan Austin [the Mustang Ranch’s real madam] said you had to be tough, because maybe you do have twenty five psychotic whores. A lot of them come from very dysfunctional backgrounds, and women together like that can be quite dangerous. ”
There’s the old joke about actors prostituting themselves for their function, but for Mirren, who’s revealed so much of herself (metaphorically and otherwise), as well as who has often spoken out about the way women get eaten up through the entertainment industry, it’s a complex metaphor. “The girls who work in the sexual intercourse industry, they put themselves out of their bodies. An actor does sort of the opposite, ” says Mirren, who talks about acting as giving every intimacy-emotional and physical-except actual intercourse. “People say ‘Oh, you play someone else. ’ I’m usually playing myself. You can only do it by going into yourself, in the deepest, the majority of terrifying way. Not to say I haven’t ever prostituted myself quite often and gladly. But in my heart it’s very serious. ”
Mirren, who began as a devoted stage actress, schooled in Chekhov and William shakespeare, quickly learned to use her sexuality to her advantage. “Especially when you’re more youthful and you’re a female, you’re being judged physically as much as for everything else, ” she says. “And when you’re a serious actress like I was … I’ve usually taken it very seriously at that level. ”
Of her scandalous earlier roles in 1969’s Age of Consent (when she stripped as the teenage muse of an older painter) or Gore Vidal and Bob Guccione’s nutty art-porn Caligula (1979), Mirren says she had a plan. “A lot of it is simple, old-fashioned practicality. I wanted to work, ” she says. “When I did Caligula, for example , We hadn’t really done movies. ” And besides, she adds, “I a lot prefer overt sexuality to sleazy, vulgar prurience. ”
As Mirren describes it, she struggled to get a handle on her own sexuality in order to use the power to accomplish her ambitions. “The Playboy Mansion, coke, and the rise of most that-Guccione and Hefner always pushed it as liberation, but it didn’t seem like which to me, ” she says. “That was women obeying the sexualized form developed by men-though maybe we always do that, because we want to be attractive. But I had been kind of a trailblazer because I demanded to do it my own way. I’d state, ‘I’m not having it put on me by someone else. ’ I didn’t wish to be the sort of puritanical good girl with a little white collar who says, ‘Don’t shag until you get married. ’ ”
Now, her reputation secure, Mirren’s enjoying the outcomes of her efforts. “I’m thrilled young girls are claiming their sexuality on their own, ” she says. “I love bold women: Madonna and Scarlett Johansson-sexy and lovely, but not only that. And Miley Cyrus-fantastic! And Lady Gaga. I love the way she has elevated pop to performance art, or dragged performance art down to appear, or maybe made a wonderful amalgam of the two. ”
With her coy smile, Mirren looks like the conspiring queen who’s usurped the throne, securing the kingdom on her heirs: “My girls: Miley, Scarlett, Lady Gaga. My team … Yes. ”
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