The one thing Helen Mirren has always hated being called: “It’s annoying and irritating”
It’s a natural human trait to be seen as attractive by other people. Due to a combination of social conditioning, evolutionary drivers and some other complex terms I don’t really understand, everyone likes to get a compliment now and then. Well, maybe not everyone, because Helen Mirren is sick of it.
You can see why it might get tiresome to be a glamorous Hollywood star and constantly reminded of your physical attraction; Richard Gere once famously got upset about being described as a sex symbol, feeling it detracted from not just his acting prowess but his charity work too. And Mirren, who has been acting in mainstream movies since the 1960s, is of a similar mentality when it comes to superficial statements.
And although she’s certainly not been shy of using her god-given assets in her films on occasion, that’s probably understandable when she has to put up with stuff like she did back in 2008, when she was sunbathing with her husband in Italy only for a member of the paparazzi (boo) to pop up out of nowhere and snap them enjoying the sun, leading to photos of her in a red bikini appearing all over the tabloids the next day, with much chatter about how good she looked.
It prompted her to tell the Radio Times: “I’ve always been tired of being called ‘sexy’. It’s annoying and irritating, I just have to put up with it”.
It reminded her of an appearance back in 1975 on a UK chat show where, rather like Gere, she got pretty pissed off with the line of questioning which bordered on offensive, the late Michael Parkinson asking her about her ‘equipment’.
Mirren recalled: “He always denied he was being sexist. How could he deny it?! But this is what we were up against”.
Mirren has had to put up with it at every stage of her long and award-winning career, in later years being described as a hot ‘older woman’, despite the roles she’s taken on being as far-removed from anything lascivious as you could imagine; for instance, the role that won her an Oscar, among her four nominations, in the 2006 docudrama The Queen.
She played Queen Elizabeth II in the film that relived the shocking death of Princess Diana in 1997 and the response to it from the Royal Family. She undertook the role so successfully that, in something of a surprise development, she was even invited by the real Queen to have dinner at Buckingham Palace, which she would turn down due to filming commitments.
Mirren’s last Oscar nomination came in 2010 for her performance in The Last Station, another biographical drama, this time focusing on the life of Russian author Leo Tolstoy, where she played his wife Sonya opposite The Sound of Music’s Christopher Plummer, with both lead actors earning Golden Globe and Academy Award nods.
Most recently, Mirren has been winning acclaim for Guy Ritchie’s gritty, star-packed TV show MobLand with Pierce Brosnan and Tom Hardy, who she publicly backed after he was apparently made to leave the show due to allegations of disruptive behaviour both on and off set. The second season of the Paramount Plus-produced series is due to hit streaming later in 2026, with Mirren reprising her role as the scheming and self-centred crime boss wife Maeve Hannigan.
