Helen Mirren: Back on the beat

Seven years ago, Helen Mirren abandoned the Prime Suspect role that made her famous. But DS Tennison is back. She tells James Rampton why she reconsidered

Dame Helen Mirren has consented to reveal the one aspect of Calendar Girls - the hugely successful movie about the members of the Rylstone Women's Institute who posed nude for a charity calendar - that gives away the fact that this archetypally British film was actually made by an American company. "They only allowed one nipple between the 12 of us!" she says, unable to contain her amusement. "You should try counting them. And the one that's allowed is probably mine." Er, yes, it is.

So before we know it, the subject of screen nakedness has suddenly exposed itself. It is a topic that has, over the years, followed Mirren like an especially persistent paparazzo. The actress recently headed a tabloid's Nudist League, and has even gone so far as to describe herself as "a nudist at heart. It's always been my fate to play nude scenes."

We're sitting in the library of a tastefully upmarket central London hotel - elegant, effortlessly chic surroundings that chime perfectly with the person I'm interviewing. Mirren looks a picture of restrained style with herimmaculately sculpted blonde hairdo and wearing a white top with a floral pattern and a dark pleated skirt - a combination whose modesty is offset by a pair of racy black stilettos.

Mirren turns out to be stimulating company; possessed of a wicked laugh, she can be summed up by two polite F-words: funny and flirtatious (as anyone who saw the mischievous way she delivered the apparently innocent line "I like tight rubber gloves, myself," on ITV1's The Frank Skinner Show will testify). The actress even retains her sense of humour when the subject of the obsessive interest in her disrobing rears its ugly head. But doesn't that fascination ever depress her? "Yes, the fixation with it does get me down a little bit," concedes Mirren, who looks years younger than 58. "I've tried being patient and gracious and funny in a pathetic way. I've even tried to be intelligent, and penetratively deconstruct the issue. I've tried everything, and it still comes back to bite me in the butt. Which is quite appropriate given the subject!

"But as Chris, my character in Calendar Girls says, flesh sells. People don't want to see pictures of churches. They want to see naked bodies. I know we're all a bit that way inclined. I've come to terms with this obsession now, but luckily it is rapidly becoming a thing of the past, anyway."

The polar opposite of a dumb blonde, Mirren is evidently far less fixated by her appearance than the rest of us. "Forget looks!" she exclaims. "My mother told me an amazingly wise thing, which is that you should never worry about getting older. You've realised you're not the only person in the world, and that beauty is not the most important thing. I have to say, to be obsessed by your looks is absolutely pathetic."

But despite Mirren's protestations that she is no longer a sex symbol, the image persists. A couple of years ago she was voted the sexiest woman on TV in a Radio Times poll. The tag may well be a hangover from the late 1960s, when she made a startling impact as a 20-year-old at the Royal Shakespeare Company and was instantly dubbed "the sex queen of Stratford".

Now Mirren reflects that the label was "like this horrible rucksack on my back, which was related very specifically to the way I looked - I happened to have blonde hair and big tits. A lot of people just can't get past that image. And I was not going to sit there and say, 'Oh, but you know I'm a serious actress, really.' I just refused to have those words come out of my mouth. I wasn't going to be the one to point out that I was actually doing pretty substantial work. If they couldn't see it, sod 'em."

It's clear that, subsequently, people have very much seen the weightiness of Mirren's work. It's not just the recently acquired damehood (which the self-confessed "old lefty" admits that 10 years ago she would have turned down) that confirms the actress's stature. Even a cursory glance at her CV reveals a career of stunning diversity. It has encompassed everything from exquisite period pieces (Gosford Park, The Madness of King George, both of which earned her Oscar nominations), memorable Brit flicks (The Long Good Friday, Cal, Last Orders) and big-budget Hollywood movies (Mosquito Coast, White Nights) to acclaimed stage productions (Cleopatra, Dance of Death), out-and-out art-house pictures (The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, O Lucky Man!) and the downright raunchy (Caligula).

Mirren's class - and her versatility - is underlined by her two forthcoming offerings. Later this month, she opens in the National Theatre's eagerly awaited version of Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra. Weighing in at five hours, this production could scarcely be accused of being insubstantial. Sipping a latte insouciantly, Mirren lists the themes that the play addresses: "Revenge, sex, incest, lust, hatred. It's like five brilliantly written episodes of Dallas rolled into one."

Before that, Mirren reprises the part that first made her a star in the eyes of Joe and Joanna Public, Detective Superintendent Jane Tennison, in a new instalment of ITV1's Prime Suspect. As the copper simultaneously investigates the murder of a Bosnian woman and fights ageism within the Met, the actress invests the character with her trademark dogged intensity. It is as riveting as ever.

Mirren now sees the role, which she first played a dozen years ago, as a watershed in her career. "Suddenly I was a woman in my forties, and I could be exactly who I was. I didn't have to try to be 10 years younger. I didn't have to be gorgeous any more - sorry, I was never gorgeous, but you know, that sex symbol thing. It was brilliant."

It has been seven years since the last series of Prime Suspect, and even though she won three consecutive Best Actress Baftas in the role, Mirren initially resisted the temptation to return to the scene of former glory. "I just worried that I was going backwards. I was also very nervous because I didn't want it to be a lesser thing.

"Seven years ago, I was in danger of losing my identity in this character, so I stepped away from her. But after seven years, I felt I'd put enough space between myself and Tennison. I thought: 'On Prime Suspect, you get the best writers and directors, and you get paid well. What are you balking at? It's not like you have to commit to 12 years of hard labour.' I mean, how often do parts this good come along? Once in a lifetime, if you're a woman."

Mirren has just completed The Clearing, a new movie in which she stars opposite Robert Redford, but what else can we expect from this most magnetic of actresses in the near future? "I'm not inundated with offers, and I don't read as many good scripts as I'd like to," sighs the actress, who has been married for the past six years to the Hollywood director Taylor Hackford. "I'm greedy. My age is a barrier in many ways, because there simply aren't the roles out there - especially in the classical canon. There isn't a King Lear for women, or a Henry V, or a Richard III.

"You reach a level where you can handle that stuff technically and mentally, and it's not there. It would have been great to play Juliet, but sadly I never got the chance. If you're young enough to play Juliet, you're too young to handle it. It's catch-22. Those sort of roles are so hard to find."

So what about following the current trend of transgender casting and taking on some of the meaty Shakespearean male leads? "I quite fancy Richard III. I would love to have played Hamlet as well, but I'm too old now. Still," Mirren concludes, clearly warming to the idea, "that didn't stop Mel Gibson..."

'Prime Suspect IV: The Last Witness' is on ITV1 on 9 & 10 November. 'Mourning Becomes Electra' is at the National Theatre, London SE1 (020-7452 3000) from 17 November