How Elena Mironova became Helen Mirren, conquered Hollywood and received the British Order

Helen Mirren, Oscar-winning actress, holder of the honorary title of the British Empire, granddaughter of an immigrant from the Russian Empire, conquered the world of cinema and did not forget her Russian roots, reports ADME.

Photo: IStock

Dame Helen Mirren is one of the most talented actresses of our time, while she is not at all arrogant and remains easy to communicate.

The title of a lady does not at all prevent her from saying a strong word from time to time, and her aristocratic origin means dancing twerk on the air of a talk show. She began her career in 1979 with the role of Caesonia, Caesar's wife, and then embodied the images of the English queens Charlotte, Elizabeth I, Elizabeth II and even the Russian Empress Catherine II.

Alyonushka Mirren

At birth, Helen Mirren received the name Elena Lidia Mironova. Her father is the son of an emigrant from the Russian Empire, Pyotr Mironov. Helen Mirren's grandfather, Pyotr Vasilyevich Mironov, was a prominent diplomat and descended from an ancient noble family of Kamensky. He was a participant in the Russo-Japanese War, and then, as a diplomat, participated in negotiations with Great Britain.

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Later in his memoirs, he wrote: “Even after the Bolsheviks announced the seizure of land, the peasants of Kuryanov were in no hurry to seize the land. Mother remained the owner of the estate until 1918, until the Bolsheviks evicted her from there. After the revolution, the church was destroyed, and the count's graves were devastated.

By the will of fate, he ended up in England, where he had to work as a taxi driver to feed his family. Until his death, he never ceased to be proud of being a Russian officer. According to his will, his ashes were sent for burial to his homeland.

Grandfather called the future actress Alyonushka, but in the 1950s, the father of the family, Vasily Mironov, changed the documents for himself and all his children. They took English names and the similar-sounding Scottish surname Mirren. Vasily did not want his descendants to experience all the hardships of the life of the children of emigrants.

Helen Mirren's mother is an Englishwoman from a working-class family, her father was a butcher who supplied meat to the court of Queen Victoria. Helen once said that her mother was more Russian than her father.

“In our family, our father was Russian by nationality, but our mother was Russian by character. Russians are extreme people; they easily move from one extreme to the other. From one extreme emotion to another, no less extreme. Dad was a very calm person. He never raised his voice to anyone in his life - in short, he was an English gentleman to the core. My mother, on the contrary, had an explosive character. She was more Russian than my Russian father,” said the actress.

And regarding her nationality, she jokes: “I am half Russian, I always say that the lower half is Russian.”

The Mirren family lived in poverty, there was no TV in their house. In the evenings, everyone gathered at the table and the father started philosophical conversations with the children: “Does a person have a soul?”, “Do people need art?” etc.

As a teenager, Mirren worked as a barker at a beach amusement park and as a waitress at her aunt's hotel.

Relatives in Russia

Only after 60 years, the actress came to her father's homeland to find her relatives and see where their family estate was located in the Smolensk region, reports Kulturologia. The actress for a long time knew almost nothing about her Russian roots - her grandfather died when she was little. She knew only a few words in Russian, but she always dreamed of finding the graves of her ancestors and meeting her relatives. An English journalist helped the actress find them, who found out where the Mironovs' estate was located and found members of her family in the archives.

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The arrival of Helen Mirren in Kuryanovo in 2007 became a real sensation. At the edge of the forest, 2 km from Kuryanovo, they discovered the foundation of the Mironov estate. A fragment of the foundation remained from the manor house. The estate was destroyed shortly after the revolution. We managed to find an old pond and a pile of stones. On it, Helen planted the favorite roses of a great-grandmother, whom she had only heard about.

When the actress arrived there, she said: “The feelings that I experienced at the Oscars are nothing compared to those that cover me now!”

And then in Moscow she met with the descendants of her grandfather's sisters. Relatives told how the family managed to survive. The sisters of Peter Mironov are buried at the Vagankovsky cemetery. But the name of the grandfather on the tombstone surprised Helen Mirren. It turned out that once Pyotr Mironov found an Orthodox priest in London and asked to send his ashes to Russia after his death, reports True Russia.

The actress admitted: “I am half Russian and proud of it, although in childhood my parents forbade me to advertise my origin. At that time, communism reigned in the USSR, and we lived in Britain, and my father did not want the Soviet relatives to have problems because of ties with the "English". When the regime fell, I sought out relatives, and we finally met. I am very flattered that I am the namesake of my favorite Russian actors - Andrei and Evgeny Mironov.

Rise of the Queen

She decided to become an actress at the age of 13 after watching an amateur production of Hamlet. "It must have been a very bad production—I remember the actors' tights falling off—but the power of the plot and the exoticism of the characters were overwhelming," Mirren recalled in her 2008 autobiography, On Screen: My Life in Words and Pictures.

At 18, Helen auditioned for the National Youth Theatre. At 22, the young actress was noticed in the role of Cleopatra and invited to the Royal Shakespeare Company. Thus began her theatrical career.

Helen once said: “The hardest period in life is when you are 20 years old. It's a shame that this is the time when a person is at the peak of his physical form. But it’s at 20 that you feel vulnerable and full of self-doubt.”

In the late 1960s, Helen met director Peter Brook. They spent a year touring the Third World, performing to natives and fruit pickers as part of his Bird Talk project, which aimed to create theater that people of any culture could understand.

This experience strongly influenced all her work.

Helen's paternal cousin, actress and model Tanya Male, played a Bond girl in Goldfinger. When, a few years later, Helen received an offer to play a Bond girl in Live and Let Die, she turned it down because she did not want to be perceived as an object of desire.

The parents of the actress often came to performances with her participation. But one day, 20 minutes before the performance, Helen's mother called and said that her father had a massive heart attack. The actress's legs buckled, but her mother said that she should act, and Mirren took the stage. After the performance, she rushed to Lee-on-Sea, but she did not have time to say goodbye to her father.

In 1975, when the actress had already starred in several scandalous films, she was once asked if her magnificent bust interfered with her ambitions of a serious actress. The girl, for whom this was the first appearance in prime time, was not at a loss and answered with dignity that she considered this question boring.

As soon as Helen Mirren began to earn good money, she gave her mother a trip: “I took her to Paris, put her in an expensive hotel, hired her a car with a driver and sent her to shop on the Champs Elysees.”

In the early 80s, Mirren had an affair with aspiring actor Liam Neeson, who is 7 years younger than her.

Helen was already a star by that time. She did a lot for Neeson's career, but after 4 years of relationship, they parted ways. After some time, Liam Neeson got married and had children, and they still maintain warm relations with Helen Mirren.

Helen met her husband, director Taylor Hackford, in 1985 on the set of the film White Nights, in which she played a Soviet ballerina. They dated for a long time, and got married only in 1997. The woman never aspired to become a mother. She repeated many times in various interviews that she lacks the “motherhood gene”. Much more important for her is freedom, the opportunity to be creative.

In 1991, Mirren starred in the iconic series Prime Suspect. She played a talented female detective who unsuccessfully seeks a balance between her career and personal life and constantly faces discrimination and sexism from her colleagues - and this is exactly what the actress herself has been struggling with all her life. She received several awards for this role.

Subsequently, Helen Mirren was among the 13 actresses who received the so-called "Triple Crown of Acting" - Tony, Emmy and Oscar awards.

"The Queen was hit by a bus"

In 2003, Helen Mirren became a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (an analogue of knighthood for women). She accepted this award, although in 1996 she refused the title of Commander of the Order of the British Empire, as she considered it too pretentious.

Madame Tussauds wax museum has 3 Helen Mirren figures: in her red carpet look, as Jane Tennyson from Prime Suspect, and as Queen Elizabeth II (from the movie The Queen).

Throughout her career in theater and film, she has played the role of royalty many times. For the role of Elizabeth II in the drama by Stephen Frears, Helen received an Oscar and an invitation to dinner at Buckingham Palace, which, however, did not take place, since the actress had to be present on the set in the United States.

Ellen DeGeneres asked Helen Mirren on her show if she was going to star in The Crown, and she said, “No. I am glad that I have already played this role, and it was successful, but I would like to complete this topic. If I get hit by a bus, I don't want headlines: "Queen hit by a bus."

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At the BAFTA awards ceremony, Prince William joked that he should have addressed Helen Mirren, who was present there, as "grandmother." The actress really liked this joke, and she repeatedly reproduced it in different situations.

The actress was never ashamed of her age and did not try to hide it. In 2014, at the age of 69, she became the face of L'Oreal's age-related cosmetics line, and agreed to participate in the advertising campaign only on the condition that her photos would not be retouched. And in 2011, Dame Mirren starred in a candid photo shoot with the British flag.

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