Finest hours: Helen Mirren’s transformation into The Queen

“Don’t call me ‘Ma’am’, I’m not the bloody Queen,” snaps Helen Mirren’s hard-bitten cop in Prime Suspect (1991), the TV show that finally brought her popular recognition. But Mirren – 80 this week and gloriously still in her professional pomp – found her career transformed 15 years later when her restrained and masterful performance as Elizabeth II in The Queen (2006) won her widespread acclaim, an Oscar, and a dinner invitation from Her Majesty, which Mirren was too busy working to attend. 

An accomplished, bold and risk-taking actor, she was still best-known for a string of sexually-charged 1980s roles that taught her how to create complex, layered women – The Long Good Friday (1980), Excalibur (1981), Cal (1984) and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989). Consequently, she was an unusual choice to star in writer Peter Morgan’s docu-drama about the week-long royal imbroglio caused by Princess Diana’s sudden death. Morgan himself thought Mirren might be “too earthy, far too direct and strong”, but marvelled at her transformative power in the role: “Helen became the Queen.”

Mirren crafted her own subtle, yet revealing portrait of Elizabeth II under siege in her dignified, privacy-loving Balmoral seclusion from a vocal, reproachful wave of public grief, and the insistent demands of new Prime Minister Tony Blair (Michael Sheen) that she participate in it. Rather than a handbag-and-poker-face caricature, Mirren drew usefully on her experience playing very different flavours of English queen, already ripely into her royal era with the tender The Madness of King George (1994) and HBO’s mini-series on passionate, outspoken Elizabeth I (2005). 

Her portrayal tapped smartly into Elizabeth II’s practised ‘performance’ of The Monarch, draped in shimmering regalia for an official portrait that transfigures her from the diminutive dressing-gowned granny we see stifling her horror at the lurid TV coverage of Diana’s death. Borrowing only Elizabeth II’s rapid walk, her rare dry putdowns, and that purposeful, enigmatic stare, Mirren portrays the Queen as a human submarine with her emotions and personality largely submerged (there’s a hint of DCI Jane Tennison’s habitual repression here, making us lean in to read her). The sovereign’s ripples of irritation at Blair’s warnings are betrayed only by compulsive desk-neatening; the public’s naked hostility in TV vox-pops prompts a nervous fingering of her pearls.

Brisk, even unfeeling early on (the Queen’s side-eye when Alex Jenning’s Prince Charles tells her of his fears of being assassinated is a wry delight), Mirren delicately humanises the Queen, as the stern battle of wills with Blair (and her increasingly restless subjects) starts to wear her down. Crying quietly with her back to us when her Land Rover breaks down, leaving her alone on the Balmoral hillside, Mirren’s stifled sobs and bowed back convey stress and grief with exquisite economy. Her sudden girlish joy at a rare stag’s appearance contrasts piercingly with a moment of still, thoughtful pity when she sees him next strung up and beheaded (a monarch-of-the-glen metaphor for the hunted precarity of UK royalty).

It’s a brilliant portrait painted in subdued colours, recognisable and revelatory all at once, as Mirren slowly reveals a monarch torn between duty to family and crown, and duty to her subjects. Director Stephen Frears often keeps the camera rapt on Mirren’s face, tracing her shifting thoughts (a whiff of her fiercely restrained Gosford Park housekeeper, thrumming with hidden intensity). Her performance is the film’s motor, pulling us on Elizabeth II’s ‘emotional journey’ (a phrase which would have made Her Majesty shudder). Mirren’s quietly complex Queen makes a small film hum with big ideas about leadership, duty and knowing when to tack into the shifting winds of public judgement. 

Public love for the newly-majestic Mirren made her a bona-fide Hollywood star, allowing her to bring newly-realised onscreen power into steely action thrillers like Red (2010), Eye in the Sky (2015), win a Tony for revisiting Elizabeth II onstage in The Audience (2015) and play a ruthless Catherine the Great (HBO 2019). Her authority, played quiet or loud, animates the TV shows of her eighth decade, as 1923’s rifle-toting western matriarch (2022/2025) and MobLand’s calculating crime boss (2025). Like Elizabeth II’s long service, Mirren’s career is defying ideas about ageing and accomplishment. Her reign is far from over.