by Helen Mirren
The screen at Times Square, showing events unfolding.
A bad case of the giggles
I did A Month in the Country twice, once in London and again in New York with a different director and cast. Both productions were very successful. I loved this play and the part of Natalya Petrovna. It was in New York that my friend and co-actor Ron Rifkin got such a bad case of the giggles that he walked off stage during a scene between the two of us and I suddenly found myself all alone on stage. I walked up and down a bit, trying to think of a soliloquy that would cover the necessary ground for the play to make sense. Ron then suddenly appeared in the doorway, red in the face, opened his mouth to speak, squeaked, and then turned around and walked off again. Luckily in a few seconds he had managed to compose himself and we played the love scene with me shooting dark looks at him.
Jennifer Garner was the understudy for the young girl. She would stand in the wings to watch. She was the loveliest young girl, both inside and out, and still is. No one could deserve the success she has had more.
During the run I got caught by a hurricane in New Orleans. The airport closed, and no cabs worked. I skidded into the theatre with five minutes to spare, having fought tooth and nail all day to get there. It was my finest hour.
Dressing rooms
Dressing rooms are an important part of backstage life, be they scruffy and cramped or spacious and decorated. It does not really matter either way. It’s nice to have somewhere to lie down between shows (at the Donmar I had to lie down in the broom cupboard), but otherwise all you need is a sink, a mirror above a table, and some light. I usually decorate my room, if I am on my own, with a special antique Chinese rug I have, some fairy lights, and a couple of cushions. I also have a leather-covered make-up box that was one of the gifts left behind by my glamorous Auntie Olga all those years ago in Southend. The box was originally a case of Elizabeth Arden products. It is now very funky and grubby, but I love it and always have it with me in the theatre. It has been through every production I have ever done, starting with the Youth Theatre.
For the duration of the play, the dressing room becomes your domain, your territory. You experience exultation and despair in that room, a beating heart and sweaty hands, and you never want to leave it and you dread entering it. It becomes an intrinsic part of your existence, more familiar than your home. Then the play finishes and you have to leave it for the next actor. From the moment you turn in the key to the stage door keeper that room has absolutely no more meaning for you. It becomes an empty vessel waiting for the next actor and his or her make-up box and fears, excitement, jubilation and anguish.
We did ‘Orpheus’ at the Donmar with one tiny dressing room shared between all the women. There were about eight of us. I loved it. Every night we would take turns at buying a bottle of champagne to share at the end of the show. We would then stick the corks on a shelf above the mirrors. I wonder if they are still there.
James Wedge
Extraordinary photographs by an extraordinary artist
James, when I met him, was a successful fashion and beauty photographer, one of the wave of London-born photographers of the late sixties and early seventies, the era of David Bailey, Donovan, the King’s Road and all that.
‘Swinging sixties’ London had completely passed me by. I guess I was working too intensely and was too obsessed with theatre to notice anything else. Besides, whenever I found myself anywhere near the King’s Road it seemed to me that I had stumbled into a club I most certainly did not belong to and where all the other members thought I should be ejected ASAP. The girls were thin and long-legged with expensive clothes and the blokes looked superior and arrogant. It was an intimidating environment, especially when, like me, you were found wanting. It had changed from the artists’ hang-out of my father’s time to the protected territory of the über-fashionistas.
James had been a part of that world, and still was to a certain extent. He had for some of the sixties been the most famous milliner in London, and then had run a very successful King’s Road boutique before turning to ‘smudging’ – the old East End term for photography, for he was a truly working-class boy, born in Hoxton back when it was the epicentre of the East End and not the trendy spot it is now. He was and is self-educated, brilliant, funny and very artistic. Just in time to catch the last years of National Service, he had joined the navy; his tales of being on a ship bound for Australia to carry out the first British atomic blasts made me cry with laughter. His photography was gorgeous, and to me a new revelation of art.
I have always loved the visual arts, and having missed out on my teenage dream of going to art school I learned a lot from James. He taught me about different photographers and their work: Bill Brandt, Ansel Adams, Man Ray, Brassaï, Diane Arbus, Helmut Newton. He taught me about printing, how to burn and dodge and solarise. He taught me about aperture and shutter speed. At that time, James was the first photographer to resurrect the old art of hand painting on photography, and produced some very beautiful pieces. He taught me how to do that too.
His work was full of imagination and often ahead of its time. I remember him fighting to use a black model for a cover shoot, and coming up against stiff resistance. He was horrified by the unspoken racism of the fashion magazines, who refused to use black models on their covers at that time.
James and his dog Tom.
He and I worked together on photo shoots that were nothing to do with publicity or fashion. They were our own private pictures. Being purely visual, this work was the perfect antidote to the work I was doing in the theatre.
Another antidote was James’s cottage in the Forest of Dean. There, not too far from where my mother had been evacuated to all those years before, I could continue the enjoyment of the countryside that had begun for me in Stratford.
The Forest of Dean is a very particular place, a strange and individual landscape that combines rural and industrial. Poor but self-sufficient, it was free of that side of British country life that I don’t enjoy: the landowners and huge estates, the huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ crowd. There is no cap-doffing in the Forest of Dean. Originally a royal hunting forest favoured by kings and queens since Norman times, it never became agricultural land where farmworkers laboured for the benefit of landowners. There are coal and iron ore mines in the area, but even these were worked by ‘freeminers’ who, having been born there, had the right to mine on an individual basis rather than as slave labour for wealthy mine owners. The people there are independent and proud, exercising ancient rights to look after the forest and its animals. The only people who are allowed to run sheep are those who were born in the forest. The sheep run free, marked by the farmers with different colours so people know to whom they belong. Our neighbours, Mr and Mrs Braine, were sheep farmers and smallholders with an encyclopaedic knowledge of country matters and anything horticultural, especially the growing of vegetables.
James, the archetypal city boy, must have had rural roots for he loved the countryside and its ways. He was a superb gardener and dry-stone wall builder. He taught me about both. I had never gardened before, and soon became obsessed, reading all I could get my hands on. I still like to go to bed with a gardening book, reading up on the best soil for amaryllis, how to grow peonies and what insects attack broccoli.
Those days with James I count as some of the happiest in my life. On Saturday night he would pick me up from the theatre at 11 p.m. after the second show had finished and we would set off on the two and a half hour drive to the forest. By 1.30 a.m. we would be out in the garden, checking to see if the carrots had grown yet. Then we would work all day Sunday, and as much of Monday as possible – back-breaking hard labour, double-trenching the potatoes and so forth – before setting off to arrive in time for the evening performance. I still miss that cottage and that part of the world.
Theses pictures were for a fashion magazine. They were shot in a beautiful old derelict music hall theatre in the middle of Hoxton, where James was born. The photo
graphs were taken in black and white, then hand-coloured by James. I worked on the shoot as model and photographer’s assistant.
Previous pages: These pictures were taken in some rented apartment while I was working.
James took some production shots of ‘The Duchess of Malfi’. Although that was not his speciality, they are better than any others.
In Front of the Camera
From the East End to Northern Ireland
The Long Good Friday came to me in the usual way, a script sent via my agent, but what a script! Barrie Keeffe wrote for the theatre and this script read like a piece of literature, full of life and wonderful dialogue. It was the best film script I had ever read. It had been written with Bob Hoskins in mind and was a perfect role for him, playing right to the strengths of his energy. I don’t think I was who they had in mind for the role of Victoria, however. The character was somewhat insipid and predictable, a cipher really, just the sidekick bimbo – a typical female character in the movies at that time, or maybe at any time. Nevertheless I was interested, partly because there were no great films being made in Britain at that time, and this was at least different and well written (apart from the woman).
When I met with Barrie and John Mackenzie, the director, I told them of my concerns about the character. They listened and between us we came up with some suggestions as to how Victoria might be brought further into the story. About four days before I was due to start work the new script arrived. As far as I could tell, nothing had been changed. I was devastated. I wanted to pull out, unable to bear the thought of playing this shadow of a person. However, that was contractually impossible, so I decided to speak my mind.
From that moment on I must have been such a pain to John. Every day that I worked, and sometimes even when I didn’t, I would arrive with script-change ideas that would make Victoria more proactive and more central to the story. Bob Hoskins was very bighearted throughout this sometimes difficult process, which was typical of Bob, as anyone who knows him will recognise. He was playing Harold with all the fury and terrifying suppressed energy that he could. It was a very demanding role. I admire him and will be for ever grateful to him for having the generosity to be aware and supportive of my efforts. Without him, I was lost. Sometimes we would improvise a scene; sometimes I would have scribbled it down on a ratty piece of paper. At the time I had no idea whether all this was working or not.
I think John must have come to dread the scenes that involved me, wanting simply to get on and shoot the thing. You are under such intense pressure as a director, a pressure that now I understand, being married to one. The weather, the budget, the studio … To have to deal with an annoyingly opinionated actress rewriting the script whenever she came on set must have been very frustrating.
Shoot it he did, making a really great film, full of the energy of the script and his own talent for raw and visceral film-making. Much of it was shot in undeveloped, still bomb-shattered parts of Wapping. The film was prescient in its understanding of what was to come. The Margaret Thatcher years had just begun, and the East End was ripe for developers. I was blown away when I finally saw the piece. John’s work was terrific, Bob’s performance legendary, and I was happy to see that all the struggles to bring Victoria to life had paid off. She was now at least an intrinsic part of the story.
I have made three of my most important films in Ireland, and along the way had a wonderful relationship with an Irishman, Liam Neeson. I met Liam on the first of these films, Excalibur, made by the iconoclast John Boorman. John bravely cast very green actors in his film. Green but talented, as we now see, with Liam, Gabriel Byrne and Cherie Lunghi in the cast. He wanted to shoot the film in his beloved Wicklow, and I had the good fortune to spend some time in Dublin. In the process I fell in love both with Liam and with Ireland.
Liam was from Northern Ireland, having grown up Catholic in a very Protestant town, Ballymena, the home town of that war-mongering priest, Ian Paisley. He introduced me to his family: his mother, father and sisters. On that day I felt as if I were going to my execution. I was terrified of meeting them. I was so wrong for Liam, in every way: I was British, I was irreligious, and I was older than him. He had grown up the only son in a family of girls, but not at all spoilt, and it made him into the kind of man he is, completely relaxed and understanding of women, the kind of man who can look a woman directly in the eye – a quality rarer than one might imagine. I think that men who grow up with sisters are wiser about women than others. His family was welcoming and gracious, and I became close to them.
Me and Liam Neeson.
Before starting Excalibur, I expressed my discomfort to John Boorman about working with Nicol Williamson again after the miserable experience of Macbeth. Nicol had been cast as Merlin and I was to play Morgana; we had all of our scenes together. Oddly enough, on my way to meet with John to talk about the film, my taxi was held up in traffic and I caught sight of Nicol in the back of a car in the next lane. Telling myself, Oh well, let bygones be bygones, I might as well be sociable, I waved. And got a dead-fish look in response. Hurriedly, I looked away, only to find myself staring at a street sign: Macbeth Street. Needless to say, I arrived full of doom, believing it would never work out.
John sensibly ignored all signs of disaster and cast us both anyway. In fact, Nicol became a good friend to me on this film. I was just becoming entangled with Liam and was feeling miserable about it, mainly because of the age difference. One day, as the two of us sat alone in the make-up trailer, Nicol turned to me and in that distinctive nasal drawl asked, ‘So what’s the matter with you then?’ He listened as I blurted out my predicament, then said, ‘Don’t worry, it probably wouldn’t work out if you were eight years younger than him either, so you may as well go for it.’ Words of pessimistic wisdom that I have often thought about, or at least the ‘Don’t worry, just go for it’ part anyway. Nicol is a difficult, inspired, brilliant, vulnerable person and on Excalibur I grew to care a lot for him.
With Liam I visited the North of Ireland often and saw the great beauty of the place. I also saw the difficulties related to the British occupation. Going into a shop your bag would be searched, and the police stations looked like concentration camps, covered in razor-wire and with lookout posts. Tanks rolling down the road were an everyday occurrence, and walking home one night from a restaurant, Liam and I were shadowed by an armed soldier, either protecting us or suspicious of us, you never knew. These were the very darkest days of sectarian killings. Many issues that were then common knowledge amongst the local people are only now coming to light, such as the collusion between the British forces, the RUC and the illegal Loyalist military organisations.
However, the most surprising element of that whole scenario was the terrific sense of humour that the people of Northern Ireland, whether Catholic or Protestant, shared. They laughed a lot and were very funny to be with. ‘Good craic’, as they call it in Ireland, is important, and we’d spent many nights in Dublin bars enjoying the craic, but I did not expect to find it in Belfast or Ballymena at that time. If anything, the sense of humour in the North was sharper than in the South. As with anywhere, people are kind, friendly and fun when you get them away from their ideologies – or maybe because of them, who knows?
My relationship with Liam and the time we’d spent in the North led me into two more Irish films, both with the Troubles as their background, and both trying to give a human face to a struggle that had demonised both sides, in the time-honoured way of war. The first of these was Cal, a love story that crossed both the age and the religious line. And then, much later, Some Mother’s Son, about a hunger striker and his family.
Produced by Jim Sheridan and written and directed by Terry George, the latter was an attempt to present a viewpoint that was apolitical and anti rhetoric, showing a human conflict within a family against the backdrop of struggle and hatred. The film was planned and executed during the peace process of 1994, when it seemed that peace would be at last possible in the North. I w
ould not have contemplated doing that film a few years earlier. By the time the film was finished, however, we were back to the times of suspicion, bias and bigotry, with the peace process destroyed by two acts of terrorism: the bomb that went off in Canary Wharf and then, later that year, the outrage and cowardly cruelty that was the bombing of Manchester city centre. I was in Manchester at the time, filming Prime Suspect. We were on location in a morgue, of all places, and heard both the bomb in the distance and then the endless wail of the ambulance sirens.
I think the Los Angeles-based producers and financiers of the film, Castlerock, had no idea what a potentially hot potato this film might be in Britain and Ireland. They saw it in a balanced and unprejudiced way for what it was, the story of a family. The very title shows where the heart of the film lies: every soldier, no matter what side they are on, is ‘Some Mother’s Son’. However, in the light of the atrocities committed by the IRA, some needed to perceive it as a pro-Republican film. This made the release difficult and I had some sticky moments promoting it. The worst of these was when, after I had been persuaded to appear on the Today programme, the interviewer started off by saying, ‘So why did you make a film that condones acts of terrorism?’ My mouth went dry. She hadn’t seen the film, of course. It was the first time I had personally experienced the battle between creativity and the accepted political posture of the moment.
Opposite: Playing Beaty Simons in Hussy, 1980.
Above: I took this photograph of the border while filming in Ireland.
Left: Some Mother’s Son 1996.
Below: With John Lynch in Cal, 1984.
Left: With Malcolm McDowell in O Lucky Man!, 1973.
