HAPPY BIRTHDAY HELEN

All at Simply Helen would like to wish Helen a very happy, love filled 63rd birthday.

You may remember Helen’s involvement in Oxfam’s “Unwrapped” campaign, last autumn/winter. The aim of the campaign was to “speak out against rubbish presents” targeted at the Christmas shoppers, it was a tongue-in-cheek parody highlighing our societies mindlessness when buying others gifts at times like Christmas, giving presents that people don’t really want or need. Instead Oxfam wanted you to buy something more worthy, giving vital equipment and help to those less fortunate than us.

Last year, here at Simply Helen we launched our “Merchandise” store. All proceeds from this store go to Oxfam, so if you want to give Helen a birthday present, why not head over to our store and pick up one of our pieces safe in the knowledge that you are not only giving Helen a present she would appreciate but also to those across the world that need our help most. You get to keep the cool Mirren-themed apparel and Helen gets the “spiritual gift” of a donation made to charity in her honour.

Thank you to those of you who have supported our “little” charity fundraiser so far. And also a big thank you to Helen for inspiring us to do something “that matters!”

A descendant of white Russian aristocracy and East London working class, Helen Mirren is in her element portraying Sofya Andreyevna, the tempestuous wife of Leo Tolstoy.

‘Let’s sit here and pretend we’re trailer trash,’ she joked, gesturing to a table and chairs outside her modestlysized on-set caravan.

Helen talked about working with Christopher Plummer - ‘a titan of stage and screen’ - who portrays a dying Tolstoy; James McAvoy, as the shy and virginal Valentin, who becomes the writer’s secretary (Kerry Cordon shakes that shyness out of him); Paul Giamatti and John Sessions, who portray two of his closest disciples; and Anne-Marie Duff, as Sasha, his favourite daughter.

Enduring Love: Plummer and Mirren (Click for bigger image)

All have been assembled for The Last Station, directed and written by Michael Hoffman from a novel by Jay Parini, who cautioned that his story is ‘fictional fact’.

Hoffman has been filming all this week at a small railway station near Wittenberg, a few hours south of Berlin. The station has been ‘dressed’ to resemble Astapovo junction in Russia, where Tolstoy breathed his last in 1910, in the stationmaster’s house.

The movie is a tale of young and old love, but is also about whether Tolstoy’s wife or the people will inherit the copyright to War And Peace and Anna Karenina.

Mirren said poor old Sofya always gets it in the neck. ‘Reading the historians, she’s always to blame for everything,’ she said, adding with a laugh: ‘But I think she was quite a handful.’

It’s a lovely screenplay, full of Chekhovian touches, intense drama, humour, and the odd pratfall, which called for the Oscar-winning actress to climb on to a window ledge and then literally crash into a private conversation.

‘It’s not just that she had his 12 children, she copied War And Peace out by hand seven times. Can you imagine?’ she asked, shaking her head.

‘When you look at a page of his original script it’s indecipherable,’ she told me, adding: ‘If it hadn’t been for Soyfa Andreyevna, nobody would have heard of Tolstoy because nobody could have read his writing!’

The theme of the film, captured beautifully in Hoffman’s screenplay, is what the actress called ‘real, enduring love’.

‘It’s the love that takes you through 30 or 40 years of your life: total, utter commitment to another person.

‘Love goes through so many phases. When you fall in love with someone, you have no idea where it’s going to end up, or the kind of challenges you’re going to have to face with each other. Very often, it doesn’t last.

She added: ‘There’s a wonderful-line, which I just love, where Tolstoy says “Why do you make it so difficult?” and she replies: “Why should it be easy? I’m the work of your life and you are the work of mine,” and that’s what love is.’

Hoffman sent her the script a year ago and there was a long wait for the film to be financed.

Mind you, McAvoy had been ‘attached’ to the project for two-and-a-half years, while Bonnie Arnold, who’s producing the picture with Chris Curling and Jens Meurer, had been trying to bring it to the screen for 17 years, after the late Anthony Quinn secured the rights from Parini.

Anyway, what struck Mirren was that, when she looked at fading photographs of Tolstoy and his environment, ‘it was exactly the environment of my grandfather and great grandmother.

‘The same era, same economic status as Tolstoy - plus he was a count and my great-grandmother a countess,’ said the star, who was born Illana Lydia Petrovna Mironov.

I clumsily suggested she and Tolstoy’s wife might share some facial features, whereupon she jokingly banged the table. ‘Don’t tell me I look like Sofya! She’s an old bat!

‘Funnily enough, though, there is the look of my grandmother about her - although my grandmother had finer features.’

The following is an email sent to Liz Smith of Wowowow from Helen in which she answers a number of questions …

Dearest Liz,

After much rushing, finishing my husband’s film, promoting my book in New York, and then enduring six-hour costume fittings here in Germany, and shooting the first week of a fabulously emotional role as Tolstoy’s wife, I finally have a moment with my computer to answer your questions, so here goes …

LIZ: Did you have more fun at the Academy Awards this year or last year when you won for “The Queen”?

HELEN: Last year at the Academy Awards was probably the best night of my life and I floated on a cloud; nothing could be better than that! Having said that, the “Dame in Red” had a grand time this year, the highlight being the honor of presenting an Academy Award to my countryman [Daniel Day-Lewis], and one of the film world’s greatest actors.

LIZ: How does it feel now to have the Oscar, the Golden Globe awards, several Emmys, the BAFTA awards, the SAG awards and everything else all behind you for your great efforts in “Prime Suspect,” “The Queen” and “Elizabeth I”? Where do you keep these things? Can you now rest on your laurels and your neat little behind?

HELEN: Darling Liz, who gets everything else right, my behind is neither neat nor little. However, you know awards are wonderful things to receive, a delicious dessert at the end of a dinner, but they are not the main course. They have to find the right place both in the home and in your professional life. In the home they should never be center, front of the mantelpiece, and in your professional life likewise.

Mine are actually spread around a bit, between L.A. and London, where Taylor and I also have a home. My Oscar is in London, I think at the moment standing halfway up the stairs. He tends to move around a bit, and I suspect has struck up a “Bronnie” relationship with the SAG “Actor” I also have in London.
(I hope you have watched “Make Me a Supermodel” to understand a Bronnie relationship!)

LIZ: You are finishing up playing a madam of a whorehouse in Nevada in “Love Ranch.” What’s the difference in being a royal queen and a royal prostitute?

HELEN: Not much! Both are the CEOs of their realm. Our queen of Britain has far more constrictions on how she behaves, but in the end, people are people, and our job as actors is to reveal their humanity.

LIZ: Your fabulous memoir, In the Frame, so beautifully done, is out now. How is this book different from other memoirs and autobiographies? I kind of see it as a dame’s scrapbook.

HELEN: Yes, my memoir has just been published in the States by Simon and Schuster. It is really a scrapbook of pictures and writing, simply and in a nonlinear way talking about some of the people and events in my life that have resulted in where I am today. I loved writing it, and did it exactly the way I wanted to. I was very busy at the time working, so I had to just let it be what it was, and not agonize about it. It is absolutely my voice, unadulterated.

LIZ: Is there any difference in working in high-falutin’, culturally aspiring famous films and segueing into acting with Joe Pesci and playing a madam in what sounds like a rousing commercial effort? I mean, what’s your take on going “down market.”
   (P.S.) Helen, my godchild Spencer, age 9, thought this was a stupid question. He said, “Lizzie, actors have to act in what they are offered; they have to always be a new character. They can’t do the same thing all the time.” He had recently played Wilbur the Pig in “Charlotte’s Web.” And then he played a female school teacher in his next school play.
   (DIVERSION HERE): Helen, I also wanted to tell you about Joe Pesci, who I adore, and the night he won the Oscar. I was backstage with press but he singled me out because he liked me and we chatted. Then he went in front of the backstage cameras and, with every single question they asked, he said the words “fuck, shit, cocksucker, motherfucker, cunt” in whatever he answered so they had nothing they could use. He is the greatest.

HELEN: Oh, gosh, Liz, nothing could be more “high falutin’” to me than working with an American film icon like Joe Pesci. The great thing about actors is that — be they Sir Ian McKellen or Joe or Sergio Peris Mencheta, or Christopher Plummer, with whom I am working right now — they all do the same thing. They put their heart and soul and blood and sweat and experience into trying to get it right. Also, this film may be placed in a legal brothel, but it is about love, and it has a wonderful, surreal heart to it. I don’t know about it being “commercial.” Of course we want it to be seen by lots of people, and know that it has much to be entertained by in it, but I would not call it a “commercial” movie, much as I would love to!
  (P.S.) Tell Spencer from me that he is absolutely right! I only wish more people in the business understood that. I love your story about Joe. It is absolutely typical. I also adored him; we got along really well together, and I loved working with him. He is not easy, but authentic and inspiring, and has a great heart.

LIZ: The great Katharine Hepburn disapproved of acting awards and thought they were ludicrous and unworthy. (She received four Oscars but others accepted for her.) Kate said only a level playing field could make for fair competition, as in all the actors playing the same role. What do you think?

HELEN: Well, of course she is right. It is often the role that is being awarded, not the performance, especially where women are concerned, as there are so few strong, complex roles that can put you through your paces. Hepburn was luckier in the era she worked in, when films were often made for the women in the audience. Also, now, of course, the whole “award” process has become both a marketing tool for the studios, and an entertainment. It is also a way for various organizations to raise their profile, and of course a time for the whole industry to celebrate and contemplate the year’s work.

LIZ: Helen, you have been extraordinarily naughty in a lot of films in the past and also on the British stage. You have sometimes taken off your clothes; you bared your breast recently in the calendar movie about middle-aged women, etc. Will you continue to shock or have you had it?

HELEN: Well, I personally have had it, and I am sure the audience has too, but you never know what might be around the corner. Remember the wise words of Spencer!

LIZ: You waited a long time to marry; you didn’t seem to want to bargain for children. (You got some of Taylor Hackford’s children anyway.) So what’s your view of a late-life wedlock? Is it better to wait?

HELEN: In marriage, like so many things, there are no rules. Certainly it was right for me to wait. It was not a theoretical thing. I simply could not see the point in being married until I married Taylor, and not even then!

I think, however, that the coming together of two people who love each other and want to commit to that is the sweetest of things, and anyone who wants to do that should be able to.

LIZ: In what way are you misunderstood?

HELEN: Hopefully, after my book, not much, as it explains a lot. Maybe people think I am more glamorous than I am, or want to be.

LIZ: Aren’t you now more American than English? You have lived in the United States for many years, being married to the all-American Taylor Hackford. Are you a British citizen still?

HELEN: I am still a British citizen, but resident in the United States. Much of my family now lives and works in the States. My nephew, Simon Mirren, is a successful writer/show runner for network television, and lives in L.A. with his kids, so that is enormously important for me. Also, of course, my stepsons, Alex and Rio, are living and working here. However, there is a corner of my heart that will always be a Brit and a Londoner. Taylor and I have a house in London and think of ourselves as living in both places.

LIZ: Do you follow American politics?

HELEN: I certainly do follow U.S. politics, especially this year when it has become a very exciting issue. This year I will have witnessed firsthand the election of three presidents, two of whom did two terms. I do find it complicated, however, with the “superdelegates,” who I had never heard of before today, and the whole ‘redo’ situation.

LIZ: A lot of women of a certain age are identifying with Hillary Clinton’s struggle for the nomination. How about you? What kind of politician could you be?

HELEN: Well, ain’t life extraordinary? Only 10 years ago, it was impossible to think — to imagine — that a Jew could be elected president, let alone a woman or a black. It’s so great; I want them both to be president. Mind you, I really liked John Edwards, too. In a way, we should all get over the excitement of the historical nature of what is about to happen and realize that the incoming president is going to have one helluva battle on his/her hands, to unify the country and bring back a sense of hope, pride, and community. I would be a lousy politician. I can’t remember names!

LIZ: Dame is a mighty grand title in Great Britain, but in America, the word has a Damon Runyon slangy meaning. What do you feel about it? Which one comes closer to describing Helen Mirren? And don’t hesitate to choose the lofty one if it applies.

HELEN: I am much more of an American dame than a British one. For that reason, no one was more surprised than me when I was offered the honor. I still can’t quite believe it and forget about it all the time. It takes me by surprise when I am reminded!

LIZ: I know you grew up in the working class in a family that was actually Russian, and you were even a carnival barker in one of those seaside resorts that are so famous in England. How does this jibe with your reaching the tippy top of your profession?

HELEN: The strange, random patterns that bring you to where you are are impossible to unravel. I think my background helped me question, work hard, and never take anything for granted, which all help towards being at least happy in my profession.

English actress Helen Mirren, 62, is returning to her Russian roots, playing the wife of classic Russian writer Leo Tolstoy in a movie, The Last Station, now shooting in Germany.

“When I was trying on the costumes, I felt like my Russian great-aunt,” quipped Dame Helen, who was born Ilyena Vasilievna Mironov.

She grew up in London and her father, son of a Russian nobleman, later changed the family name to Mirren.

Though the film is set in Russia, the German producers are doing much of the shooting at similar looking locations in Saxony Anhalt, a provincial region in eastern Germany.

The historical drama depicts the elderly Tolstoy (1828-1910) in a struggle between wealth and his urge to let go of material things.

Mirren plays his wife Sofia, who is outraged when he plans a will bestowing the royalties from his books to charity.

In Berlin, Mirren, star of The Queen, said she would check out during her stay the links between her aristocratic Russian ancestors and Germany.

Her own family and Tolstoy’s came from a similar social background.

Christopher Plummer, playing Tolstoy, said he did not have such family links, quipping to reporters, “I feel like an idiot playing a genius.”

The film is being produced by Egoli Tossell Film Halle and directed by Andrei Konshalovski of Russia.

After playing royals ancient and modern, a hard-nosed cop and all manner of fantasy females, the Oscar winner has written a memoir, In the Frame. Helen Mirren will now take your questions.

What was the most difficult point in your career?
I think probably my mid-30s, which was the one time really when it should have been the best because I was experienced and ready, and the kind of work that I wanted to do just didn’t come my way. But you know, you just carry on—I did anyway—regardless. I would just do whatever work came my way.

Have you considered taking a role in an American TV show?
The terrible thing about network TV is that if you’re successful, you’re not doing anything else for six years. And although success is wonderful, I don’t want that kind of success. You know, variety is the spice of my life. I have to keep changing everything. And I wouldn’t enjoy being a TV personality.

Do you think it’s important for celebrities to contribute their two cents on political, ethical and economic problems?
I’ve used my voice to publicize certain issues. I’ve been involved with Oxfam on the proliferation of the illegal sale of small arms throughout the world, which is causing such, such devastation, and the war in northern Uganda. The only way you can sometimes garner attention is by sending someone like me as a front person.

You were recently in Reno, Nev., filming your new movie, Love Ranch. What’s your view on brothels?
I think legal prostitution is the way to go, given the awful, horrendous traffic in women and the danger of girls being out on the street, so vulnerable to pimps and johns. In a legal brothel, they’re licensed, they’re protected, and the johns are protected because they know the girls have to be medically checked every week.

Have you ever had a role in which your views are the opposite of the character you portray?
In The Mosquito Coast I played a role only called Mother. She was always in the kitchen and supporting her husband, never arguing. The way I got my head around it was that I had recently played Morgana in Excalibur, who was the male fantasy of the evil, sexually voracious witch woman. So I thought, Cool, I can play the two sides of the coin of male fantasy about women.

Have you had any royal-family feedback after your fascinating performance as the Queen?
No. I was invited to dinner by the Queen after I’d done it, and I don’t think she would have done that if she’d hated it. I couldn’t go, unfortunately.

Do you have any affinity with your father’s Russian heritage?
I was there not long ago. It’s so vast. I know America is vast, but there is a Wal-Mart everywhere in America, whereas in Russia it’s vast, and it really changes. When I go to Russia, I realize I look Russian; people come up to me and speak to me in Russian.

What is your favorite vegetable?
I do love potatoes.

You have a tattoo on your hand. What is it, and why did you get it?
The short answer is, I got drunk. I think I write about it in the book. But yes, I got drunk on an Indian reservation in Minnesota. It’s a South American Indian sign.

If you could go anywhere in the world tomorrow, where would you go and why?
I’d find a little green corner of England with a river running through it and a tree to sit under, and I’d just sit there for the afternoon with a book and a pillow.

While there are many actresses and actors who remain very attractive for their age, you have managed to stay not only attractive but very sexually alluring without the quantifier of “for her age” being needed. Do you believe this is due to your attitude towards life and sexuality or some other factors?
I don’t think most women do lose their so-called sex appeal. It just shifts into a different arena, you know. It’s more to do with life, and appreciation of life, and I think it’s [that] their perception has shifted in some way. But there’s no question, you know; full on sex appeal is for the young—it is. That’s nature. And so it should be. But older men and older women, when they say sex appeal I don’t think they really mean sex. I think they’re talking about something else. I think they’re talking about some indefinable thing that has to do with appreciation of life, wisdom, and all kinds of things. There should be a special word for it. I don’t think sex is quite the right word actually.

[If you were an American voter] would you support Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton?
I find American politics quite hard to comprehend exactly how they work. Most Americans do, especially with this whole Florida and redo and all the rest of it—so complicated. I just about got my head around it. And also it’s quite hard for Europeans to really understand the power of the President. The president has so much power, much more power than our prime minister does, for example. I would love to vote for all of them, quite honestly, or not vote for any of them. I’m quite cynical in general about politicians. Politicians always come in on a wave of hope and then of course it all goes terribly wrong every single time. Obviously I would love to see a female President in America, but I would also love to see a charismatic black President. And then of course, you know, there are many other people; I though John Edwards was a wonderful candidate. So it’s difficult, really. Would I vote for Hillary? I don’t know whether I would or not right now. I don’t know. All you want of your politicians is a kind of honesty, and I know that’s the one thing they can’t deliver, actually. I’ve met Hillary Clinton, you know, and she was incredibly impressive and charming. I think she probably would make a great president, or a great vice-president, or a great adviser to the president.

Which director(s) did you learn the most from and why?
The truth is you learn a different thing from all of them. They all have something to offer and every film by its nature—different actors, the different photographers, different writing, the different atmosphere of the film—you learn something from all of them. I think the best bit of advice I was ever given about film acting came from an American actor and producer and director called Bob Balaban. He said, You don’t know where the arrow of your performance is going to land. You have no idea. And I had found that out to be true. You know when you intensely, intensely try and emotionally express the pain of loss [or] whatever you’re trying to do, and what’s on the screen is something completely different. Not what you intended at all. It may be interesting, often, but something completely different. Where that comes from—’I didn’t do that, I was doing that and that came out—can drive you crazy as an actor. So he said just let the arrow land where it will, [act] as instinctively and as truthfully as possible, but then let it go wherever it goes and don’t torture yourself when you go home at night. And that was great advice and I’ve absolutely followed that. It kind of liberated me.

Do you really prefer tea over coffee?
PG Tips [tea]. All Brits drink PG Tips.