There’s something disarmingly serene about Dame Helen Mirren when she speaks to me from the Cannes Film Festival. The 79-year-old L’Oréal Paris ambassador (a position she has held since 2014), and star of The Queen, Calendar Girls, Barbie and Paramount+ hits MobLand and 1923, is gearing up for the red carpet. Despite the thrum of the La Croisette outside, heaving with street-style-photographer bait, eagle-eyed paparazzi and a steady stream of blacked-out vehicles shuttling between five-star hotels, Mirren is radiating couldn’t-care-less calm.
Soon she’ll be stepping out at the Colours Of Time premiere in a custom gown by Badgley Mischka, a statement fascinator and Margot McKinney’s show-stopping Marina Collier necklace made with over 400 carats worth of gemstones. Shoulders back, chin tilted up, Mirren assumes a regality in front of the cameras that speaks to her illustrious stage career and Oscar-winning performance as Elizabeth II (she has portrayed three British monarchs on screen to date).
Here, though, she has set her crown aside, let her hair down and is talking animatedly about the initiative she has come to the French Riviera to support – the L’Oréal Paris Lights On Women Award, which spotlights rising female talent in the film industry. ‘What a great thing to recognise women and their work in this community,’ she says.
‘When I arrived on the scene as an actress, I’d step onto set and there would be 150 men and three women – almost exclusively working in the costume and hair and makeup departments.’ Mirren notes a shift in the last decade. ‘Now, when I walk onto a film set, maybe a quarter of the people there are women and I’m talking about women directors, cinematographers, women in the sound department, in the electrical department – it’s moving.’
Mirren, who lives with husband, director Taylor Hackford, and splits her time between London, New York and Lake Tahoe, grew up in Southend-on-Sea in Essex. ‘Some of my earliest beauty memories are from when I was about 14. We weren’t wealthy and I got all my beauty products from the counter at Woolworths.’
She remembers one product vividly. ‘For some insane reason it was fashionable to wear white lipstick, not pale pink – pure white! It must have been some “mod” trend, but it looked awful and, needless to say, it has never come back into fashion, thank god.’ Does she consider herself an Essex girl? ‘Yes,’ she smiles, ‘I have to say I am a bit of an Essex girl at heart.’
Her big break came when she was 20, playing Cleopatra in the National Youth Theatre’s 1965 production of Antony and Cleopatra at London’s Old Vic and Mirren credits the role with launching her career. Six decades and countless awards later (Mirren is one Grammy away from EGOT status) and the Dame is still a sucker for the thrill of a high street beauty buy.
‘My idea of a treat is going into a drugstore and buying myself another lip liner,’ she says. ‘I sit at my little desk at home and can spend hours putting my make-up on, it’s something I’ve always loved to do,’ though today’s conveyor belt of beauty launches poses something of a pet peeve. ‘It’s not that I don’t like trying new products, the innovation is amazing,’ she caveats, ‘but it’s heartbreaking when you hit on a foundation or a mascara that you love – the golden chalice! – only to find out a few years later that it has been discontinued.’
Mirren does a fine line in innovation herself. Just when you think you’ve got the sum of her style, she throws a headline-making plot twist into the mix. Take her cerulean updo at 2023’s Cannes Film Festival. ‘It was a spur of the moment thing,’ she reveals, ‘I sat in the chair and suddenly thought, wouldn’t it be great to have blue hair to match my blue dress?’ Unfazed, Stephane Lancien, Mirren’s hair pro on the day, strode off to his kit bag and returned brandishing a bouquet of blue hair pieces. ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ she says, still marvelling, ‘he concocted this marvellous hairdo for me on the spot.’
As Mirren approaches her 80th birthday next month, she continues to be rambunctiously vocal on the subject of ageing. I interviewed Mirren in 2023, after she had taken part in a panel talk showcasing a survey by L’Oréal Paris, which found that 70% of women are told they ‘look good for their age’ from as young as 25. Mirren was at the helm of the brand’s campaign to change the narrative and, in between telling me about her favourite perfume – Hermès Un Jardin En Méditerranée Eau de Toilette – and recommending castor oil for healthy cuticles, she revealed that she is not averse to the phrase ‘ageing gracefully’ as long as it doesn’t come with a set of limits, ‘that you’re not allowed to dye your hair or wear stilettos,’ she said. She got so revved up on stage that day that she was later advised to tone down her language, despite earning herself a series of impassioned whoops from the audience.
Today, if she could drum anything into the younger generation it would be this: ‘Don’t smoke, that’s rule number one and do everything, but don’t do too much of anything – that’s a great way of looking at things, because it’s important to take care of your health, but you also don’t want to live like a nun.’
Growing up, Mirren idolised Italian and Academy Award-winning actor Anna Magnani. ‘I loved her style, I loved her acting, I loved her personality, I loved her reality – she was my role model as an actor and as a person.’ Magnani was revered for her gritty portrayals of ordinary women, a down-toearth star famed for her wit.
Fans embrace Mirren for many of the same reasons, her candour (she’s seemingly immune to the new-age media training that saps so much personality from Hollywood) and her lack of ego. ‘It always surprises me when someone comes up to me in a supermarket or an airport and says that they think I’m great, but it’s lovely,’ she says fondly, ‘this sort of thing is fun, it’s fabulous, it’s fantastic. It doesn’t feel right to say that I’m proud of being a role model to people, but it's a great feeling.’
There’s a magnetism to Mirren, a charisma that runs deeper than her bombshell legacy and transcends the homeliness of roles like Elizabeth Best, a retirement village sleuth in her upcoming movie, an adaptation of Richard Osman’s novel The Thursday Murder Club. It led rapper 50 Cent to admit to a long-standing crush on her – ‘She’s sexy. It’s the confidence’ – and Liam Neeson to say ‘fuck’ when he saw her for the first time dressed as Morgana le Fay on the set of Excalibur in 1980, ‘I was smitten,’ he’s since admitted.
But forget Arthurian legend, there’s a beauty industry myth that I want to fact check with Mirren. I once heard that in the lead up to filming a L’Oréal Paris Age Perfect Hair Colour campaign, she politely declined the brand’s offer of a globally renowned hair colourist, instead insisting that she apply the box dye herself at home. ‘Yes!’ she laughs, ‘I asked them to send the box to me. That’s the point of the whole thing, isn’t it? I wanted to do it myself, to genuinely be able to tell people that it’s a great product, which it is.’
You can’t argue with that level of authenticity. That’s how to win fans, that’s how to influence people and that’s how to do it like a Dame.
Top image: Courtesy of L'Oréal Paris