14 DAY TRIAL // Dame Helen Mirren has never made a secret of her rather turbulent past or her hell-raising days, when she’d go to extreme lengths to make sure she’d stand out from the crowd. Now about to turn 65 (her birthday is next month), the British actress remains her old outrageous and nonconformist self – even more, she’s ready to prove it with a one of a kind feature and interview for New York Magazine.
The photospread includes, among regular portraits of the star, a couple of images in which she’s shown in a bathtub, obviously wearing no clothes. The stills are done in a very artsy and classy manner, in the sense that there is nothing offending about them, but they still stand as testimony that, when it comes to being outrageous, there is no outdoing this particular actress, it is being said. The accompanying interview only comes to strengthen this first impression, as Mirren spares no effort when it comes to getting her ideas out there.
“It’s true! I haven’t grown out of that, have I?” Mirren says laughing about her image. “I’m still the good girl who wants to be a bad girl. But I’ll never make it as a bad girl… I’m not a prude or a moralist and I never have been, but I’m too fearful, too much of a wimp, really,” the actress adds. Still, what she can’t do herself, she admires in others: women like Madonna, Lady Gaga and even the younger Miley Cyrus, who are not afraid to use their bodies to have their message out there but, above all, women who would never hide their true nature just because mainstream may happen not to agree with it.
“I love bold women: Madonna and Scarlett Johansson – [hot] and gorgeous, but not only that. And Miley Cyrus – fantastic! And Lady Gaga. I love the way she’s elevated pop to performance art, or dragged performance art down to pop, or maybe made a wonderful amalgam of the two. My girls: Miley, Scarlett, Lady Gaga. My team… Yes,” the actress says with a coy smile of the women she most looks up to.
In the same interview, Dame Helen Mirren also talks about teaming up with her husband Taylor Hackford for a film and how she managed to become “notorious.” The actress is fully aware that she has a certain notoriety attached to her name but, as she sees it, it’s starting to fade away as she grows older and, in almost no time, people will hardly remember she ever was.