From fairground “hustler” to the Hollywood silver screen, Dame Helen Mirren’s success has been a long time in the making...
WORDS: SUE CRAWFORD PICTURES: SHUTTERSTOCK
According to the proverb, good things come to those who wait, and none know that more than Dame Helen Mirren.
For despite showing great promise in her 20s – she was the youngest actress ever to be invited to join the Royal Shakespeare Company – it was actually decades later before she hit the big time in Hollywood.
Even then, Dame Helen had to bide her time. For while she received an Academy nomination for her role in 1995’s The Madness of King George, it was another 12 years before she won her first Oscar, for her portrayal of Elizabeth II in The Queen.
Meanwhile it wasn’t until 2013 – by which time she was 68 – that she was finally honoured with a star on the famed Hollywood Walk of Fame.
“I wanted fame when I was 22,” Dame Helen recalled in an interview recently. “I had a certain kind of success in Britain, but the kind of international success I got didn’t come until after 40.”
The legendary star was only 13 when she set her heart on an acting career.
Her home life at the time was a world away from the glamour of showbusiness.
Her mum Kitty was a working-class woman from East London, the 13th of 14 children, and her father Vasily was a Russian immigrant who worked as a taxi driver.
But after watching an amateur production of Hamlet, Dame Helen knew immediately what she wanted to do.
“I was blown away by all this over-the-top drama,” she later said.
“We grew up without TV and never went to the cinema, so after Hamlet all I wanted to do was get back into that world where all those fabulous things were possible.”
However, it was bright lights of a different kind when she landed her first job... working in a local fairground.
Growing up in Leigh-on-Sea in Essex, she approached an amusement park in nearby Southend when she was in her late teens and was hired as a hustler, whose job was to pull in the punters and encourage them to go on the rides.
Henri Grecourt, who arranged the job for her, says the high-flying actress was “pretty good”.
“Helen said she was looking for a job. Working on a fairground attracts people and they think it is a glamorous job,” he recalls. “She was bubbly and quite ambitious. She always had a nice, posh talking voice.”
But
