Helen Mirren: Rated As Hottest Women Above 60


  Helen Mirren: Rated As Hottest Women Above 60Helen Mirren is 68 years of age. She has been selected by Askmen.com as the Sexiest Lady Over 60. She was born on 26th July 1945. Dame Helen Lydia Mirren, DBE (n�e Mironoff ), is an English actor. Mirren has won an Academy Award for Best Actress, four BAFTAs, three Golden Globes, four Emmy Awards, and two Cannes Film Festival Best Actress Awards. In 2003, she received a damehood for services to the performing arts at a ceremony at Buckingham Palace.

Mirren began her acting career with the Royal Shakespeare Company in the latter half of the 1960s. From her very first film appearance (playing the young muse to a middle-aged artist in 1969�s Age of Consent), Mirren displayed the overtly sensual screen persona that would become her trademark. Other early movies included O Lucky Man! (1973), Excalibur (1981) and The Long Good Friday (1982).

During her career, she has portrayed three British queens in different films and television series: Elizabeth I in the television series Elizabeth I (2005), for which she received Emmy and Golden Globe Awards for Best Actress, Elizabeth II in The Queen (2006), which won her the Academy and BAFTA Award for Best Actress, and Queen Charlotte in The Madness of King George (1994), for which she earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. She is the only actress ever to have portrayed both Queens Elizabeth on the screen.

Mirren played the no-nonsense police detective Jane Tennison on the praised ITV series Prime Suspect for a total of seven seasons from 1991 to 2006, and won numerous awards for the role, including BAFTA and Emmy awards. Making her West End stage debut in the 1970s, Mirren returned to the London stage most recently in 2013, playing Queen Elizabeth II for the second time in a play titled The Audience. Mirren was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in January 2013. In April 2013, she was awarded best actress at the Laurence Olivier Awards for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II in The Audience.

Mirren was born Helen Lydia Mironoff in Queen Charlotte's Hospital, Hammersmith, London. Her father, Vasiliy Petrovich Mironov (1913�1980), was of Russian origin, originally from Kuryanovo, Smolensk Oblast, and her mother, Kitty (n�e Kathleen Alexandrina Eva Matilda Rogers; 1909�1996), was English. Mirren's paternal grandfather, Colonel Pyotr Vasilievich Mironov, was in the Imperial Russian Army and fought in the 1904 Russo-Japanese War. He later became a diplomat, and was negotiating an arms deal in Britain when he and his family were stranded during the Russian Revolution. The former diplomat became a London cab driver to support his family and eventually settled down in England.

His son, Helen Mirren's father, changed the family name to Mirren in the 1950s and became known as Basil Mirren. He played the viola with the London Philharmonic before World War II, and later drove a taxi cab and was a driving-test examiner, before becoming a civil servant with the Ministry of Transport. Mirren's mother was a working-class Londoner from West Ham, East London, and was the 13th of 14 children born to a butcher whose own father had been the butcher to Queen Victoria. Mirren considers her upbringing to have been "very anti-monarchist". Mirren was the second of three children; she was born two years after her older sister Katherine ("Kate"; born 1942), and has a younger brother, who was named Peter Basil after his grandfather and great-great-grandfather. Mirren was brought up in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex.

Mirren attended St Bernard's High School for Girls in Southend-on-Sea, where she acted in school productions, and subsequently a teaching college, the New College of Speech and Drama in London, "housed within Anna Pavlova's old home, Ivy House" on the North End Road � which leads from Golders Green to Hampstead, N. London. Aged eighteen, she auditioned for the National Youth Theatre and was accepted. By the time she was 20, she was playing Cleopatra in the NYT production of Antony and Cleopatra at the Old Vic, which led to her signing with the agent Al Parker.

As a result of her work for the NYT, Mirren was invited to join the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). While with the RSC, she played Castiza in Trevor Nunn's 1966 staging of The Revenger's Tragedy, Diana in All's Well That Ends Well (1967), Cressida in Troilus and Cressida (1968), Phebe in As You Like It (1968), Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1970), Tatiana in Gorky's Enemies at the Aldwych (1971), and the title role in Miss Julie at The Other Place (1971). She also appeared in four productions, directed by Braham Murray for Century Theatre at the University Theatre in Manchester, between 1965 and 1967.

  Helen Mirren: Rated As Hottest Women Above 60In 1970, the director/producer John Goldschmidt made a documentary film, Doing Her Own Thing, about Mirren during her time with the Royal Shakespeare Company. The film was made for ATV and shown on the ITV Network in the UK. In 1972 and 1973, Mirren worked with Peter Brook's International Centre for Theatre Research, and joined the group's tour in North Africa and the US, during which they created The Conference of the Birds. She then rejoined the RSC, playing Lady Macbeth at Stratford in 1974 and at the Aldwych Theatre in 1975.

It was reported by Sally Beauman, in her 1982 history of the RSC, that Mirren�while appearing in Nunn's Macbeth (1974), and in a highly publicised letter to The Guardian newspaper�had sharply criticized both the National Theatre and the RSC for their lavish production expenditure, declaring it "unnecessary and destructive to the art of the Theatre," and adding, "The realms of truth, emotion and imagination reached for in acting a great play have become more and more remote, often totally unreachable across an abyss of costume and technicalities..." According to Beauman, there were no discernible repercussions for this rebuke of the RSC.

A further stage breakthrough came in 1994, in an Yvonne Arnaud Theatre production bound for the West End, when Bill Bryden cast her as Natalya Petrovna in Ivan Turgenev's A Month in the Country. Her co-stars were John Hurt as her aimless lover Rakitin and Joseph Fiennes in only his second professional stage appearance as the cocksure young tutor Belyaev. "Instead of a bored Natalya fretting the summer away in dull frocks, Mirren, dazzlingly gowned, is a woman almost wilfully allowing her heart's desire for her son's young tutor to rule her head and wreak domestic havoc....Creamy shoulders bared, she feels free to launch into a gloriously enchanted, dreamily comic self-confession of love." (John Thaxter, Richmond & Twickenham Times, 4 March 1994).

Mirren was twice nominated for Broadway's Tony Award as Best Actress (Play): in 1995 for her Broadway debut in A Month in the Country, now directed by Scott Ellis ("Miss Mirren's performance is bigger and more animated than the one she gave last year in an entirely different London production", Vincent Canby in the NY Times, 26 April 1995). Then again in 2002 for August Strindberg's Dance of Death, co-starring with Sir Ian McKellen, their fraught rehearsal period coinciding with the terrorist attacks on New York on 11 September 2001 (as recorded in her In the Frame autobiography, September 2007).

Mirren had an unhappy experience at the National Theatre in 1998 when she played Cleopatra to Alan Rickman's Antony. In 2000 Nicholas Hytner, who had worked with Mirren on the film version of The Madness of King George, cast her as Lady Torrance in his revival of Tennessee Williams' Orpheus Descending at the Donmar Warehouse in London. Michael Billington, reviewing for The Guardian, described her performance as "an exemplary study of an immigrant woman who has acquired a patina of resilient toughness but who slowly acknowledges her sensuality."

At the National Theatre in November 2003 she again won praise playing Christine Mannon ("defiantly cool, camp and skittish", Evening Standard; "glows with mature sexual allure", Daily Telegraph) in a revival of Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra directed by Howard Davies. "This production was one of the best experiences of my professional life, The play was four and a half hours long, and I have never known that kind of response from an audience ... It was the serendipity of a beautifully cast play, with great design and direction, It will be hard to be in anything better." (In the Frame, September 2007). She played the tragic title role in Jean Racine's Ph�dre at the National in 2009, in a production directed by Nicholas Hytner. The production was also staged at the amphitheater of Epidaurus on 11 and 12 July 2009.

Mirren has also appeared in a large number of films throughout her career. Some of her earlier film appearances include roles in Midsummer Night's Dream, Age of Consent, O Lucky Man!, Caligula, Excalibur, 2010, The Long Good Friday, White Nights, When the Whales Came and The Mosquito Coast. She appeared in Some Mother's Son, Painted Lady, The Prince of Egypt and The Madness of King George. One of her other film roles was in Peter Greenaway's The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, as the eponymous thief's wife, opposite Michael Gambon. In Teaching Mrs. Tingle she plays sadistic History teacher, Mrs Eve Tingle. In 2007 she claimed director Michael Winner had treated her "like a piece of meat" at a casting call in 1964. Asked about the incident, Winner told The Guardian: �I don�t remember asking her to turn around but if I did I wasn�t being serious. I was only doing what the casting agent asked me - and for this I get reviled! Helen�s a lovely person, she�s a great actress and I�m a huge fan, but her memory of that moment is a little flawed.�

  Helen Mirren: Rated As Hottest Women Above 60Mirren continued her successful film career when she starred more recently in Gosford Park with Maggie Smith and Calendar Girls where she starred with Julie Walters. Other more recent appearances include The Clearing, Pride, Raising Helen, and Shadowboxer. Mirren also provided the voice for the supercomputer "Deep Thought" in the film adaptation of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. During her career, she has portrayed three British queens in different films and television series: Elizabeth I in the television series Elizabeth I (2005), Elizabeth II in The Queen (2006), and Queen Charlotte, the wife of George III, in The Madness of King George (1994). She is the only actress ever to have portrayed both Queens Elizabeth on the screen.

Mirren's title role of The Queen earned her numerous acting awards including a BAFTA, a Golden Globe, and an Academy Award, among many others. During her acceptance speech at the Academy Award ceremony, she praised and thanked Elizabeth II and stated that she had maintained her dignity and weathered many storms during her reign as Queen. Mirren later appeared in supporting roles in the films National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets, Inkheart, State of Play, and The Last Station, for which she was nominated for an Oscar.

In preparation for her role as a retired Israeli Mossad agent in the film The Debt, Mirren reportedly immersed herself in studies of Hebrew language, Jewish history, and Holocaust writing, including the life of Simon Wiesenthal, while in Israel in 2009 for the filming of some of the movie's scenes. The film is a remake of a 2007 Israeli film of the same name (Hebrew: Ha-khov). She played Alfred Hitchcock's wife Alma in the 2012 biopic Hitchcock, about the making of Psycho.

Mirren is known for her role as detective Jane Tennison in the widely viewed Prime Suspect, a multiple award-winning television drama series that was noted for its high quality and popularity. Her portrayal of Tennison won her three consecutive BAFTA Awards for Best Actress between 1992 and 1994. Some of Mirren's other television performances include Cousin Bette (1971); As You Like It (1979); Blue Remembered Hills (1979); The Twilight Zone episode "Dead Woman's Shoes" (1985); The Passion of Ayn Rand (1999), where her performance won her both the Emmy and the Golden Globe; Door to Door (2002); and The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (2003).

In 1976, she appeared with Laurence Olivier, Alan Bates and Malcolm McDowell in a production of Harold Pinter's The Collection as part of the Laurence Olivier Presents series. She also played Elizabeth I in 2005, in the television serial Elizabeth I, for Channel 4 and HBO, for which she received an Emmy Award. Mirren won another Emmy Award on 16 September 2007 for her role in Prime Suspect: The Final Act on PBS in the same category as in 2006. Mirren hosted Saturday Night Live on 9 April 2011.

The Mars Volta on their 2008 album The Bedlam in Goliath have a song called "Ilyena" that is named after Mirren. Mars Volta lyricist/singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala has stated an affinity for Mirren.
 

Awards and nominations received by Helen Mirren.


  Helen Mirren: Rated As Hottest Women Above 60For her role in the film Cal, Mirren was voted Best Actress at both the 1984 Cannes Film Festival and the 1985 Evening Standard British Film Awards. In 1994 and 2001, she was nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her roles in The Madness of King George and Gosford Park, respectively. In 1995, she had also been awarded for Best Actress once again in Cannes for playing Queen Charlotte in The Madness of King George.

In 2002, she received the SAG Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture for Gosford Park. Mirren is the first female actress to have been nominated for three acting performances at the Golden Globe Awards in the same year. She won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role in the movie drama category for her performance in Stephen Frears' The Queen in 2006 (along with two nominations in the Best Actress in a Mini-series or TV Movie category for Elizabeth I and Prime Suspect: Final Act). She also won two SAG awards the same year for the same roles. Mirren is the third actor to win two Golden Globes in the same year, and the first ever to win awards for lead roles in TV and film in the same year. She is one of only three actresses (the first was Liza Minnelli in 1973 and then decades later Helen Hunt) to win a Golden Globe, an Oscar and an Emmy for performances given in the same year.

Along with the Golden Globe, Mirren's acclaimed performance in The Queen won her the 2007 Academy Award for Best Actress. She also received Best Actress awards from the Venice Film Festival, Broadcast Film Critics, National Board of Review, Satellite Awards, Screen Actors Guild and a BAFTA, as well as critics awards from all over the world. Entertainment Weekly recently ranked her Number 2 for Entertainer of the Year for 2006 and also won the award for best actress in film at the new Greatest Britons Awards for her role in The Queen. In 2007, Mirren became an Honorary Patron of the University Philosophical Society at Trinity College Dublin. She won the Best Actress award at the 2009 Rome International Film Festival for her performance as Tolstoy's wife in The Last Statio.
 

Academy Award nominations

Best Actress
2006 � The Queen
2009 � The Last Station

Best Supporting Actress

1994 � The Madness of King George
2001 � Gosford Park

Mirren won a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Leading Role in a Mini-series or TV Movie in 1997 for her role in Losing Chase. She received two nominations in the Actress in a Mini-series or TV Movie category for Elizabeth I, and Prime Suspect: The Final Act, where she only won the Golden Globe for her title role performance in Elizabeth I. In that same year she won an SAG award for that same role. Mirren also won an Emmy for her role in Elizabeth I in category Lead Actress in a Mini-Series or a Movie in 2006. She had previously won an Emmy twice before, in that same category, in 1996 for her role in Prime Suspect: Scent of Darkness and in 1999 for The Passion of Ayn Rand.

At the end of a triumphant year of awards for her acclaimed movie performance as Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen, Dame Helen also collected a 2007 Emmy Television award as Best Actress in a Mini-Series for her performance as Detective Superintendent Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect: The Final Act. She now has four Emmy awards. This seventh, and apparently concluding instalment, of the Prime Suspect saga portrayed Tennison as an alcoholic destined for retirement. It was screened in the US on the public service network PBS.

Emmy Awards

  Helen Mirren: Rated As Hottest Women Above 60Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or Movie
1993 � Prime Suspect 2
1994 � Prime Suspect 3
1996 � Prime Suspect 4: "Scent of Darkness" (Won)
1997 � Prime Suspect 5: Errors of Judgment
1999 � The Passion of Ayn Rand (Won)
2003 � The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
2004 � Prime Suspect 6: The Last Witness
2006 � Elizabeth I (Won)
2007 � Prime Suspect: The Final Act (Won)
Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or Movie
2003 � Door to Door

Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire
 

On 5 December 2003, she was invested as a Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (DBE). When she received the honour, Mirren commented that Prince Charles was "very graceful" but forgot to give her half of the award. Another person had to remind him to give Mirren the star. She also said that she felt wary about accepting the award and had to be persuaded by fellow comrades to accept the damehood. In 1996, she had declined appointment as a Commander of the order (CBE)

Hollywood Walk of Fame

Mirren at a ceremony to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in January 2013. On 3 January 2013, Helen Mirren received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and joked about her star's proximity to that of The King's Speech actor Colin Firth, stating: "I couldn't be prouder and more happy that I'm actually going to finally lie next to Colin Firth, something I've been wanting to do for a very long time."

Academy Awards: 2006 Best Actress The Queen Won
BAFTA Awards: 2006 Best Actress The Queen Won
Golden Globe Awards : 2006 Best Actress The Queen Won
Satellite Awards: 2006 Best Actress The Queen Won
Screen Actors Guild Awards: 2001 Outstanding Supporting Actress Gosford Park Won
Outstanding Cast : Won
Outstanding Actress : 2006 The Queen Won
 

BAFTA Awards

1991 Best Actress Prime Suspect Won
1992 Best Actress Prime Suspect 2 Won
1993 Best Actress Prime Suspect 3 Won

 

 

Dated 11 November 2013

 

 

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