Helen Mirren Quotations | Page 2

I don't get to play the same role over and over in different movies. The roles that I get to play are quite varied, which is great.

I have done film, television and theatre - all at a pretty substantial level - I don't think it's possible for American actors to do that.

I resent having witnessed the survival of some very mediocre male actors and the professional demise of the very brilliant female ones.

I've been working every year since I started acting, and I got many awards before I won the Oscar for 'The Queen.'

I don't throw a lot of parties. I find throwing parties a bit intimidating.

Obviously, we're putting 20 years into four hours, so things have to become truncated.

One thing I found hard to get scripted was the size of her ego. Her ego was so huge. She was about being the queen, and everybody had better treat her as the queen. I am not like that.

I would feel very bad if she didn't like the way I played her. I certainly don't want to stick a knife in her - especially now that I'm a dame, and I might have that taken away from me.

I didn't want to be knocked over by a car and have my obituary talk only about Prime Suspect.

Fortunately, my husband is an Anglophile. He even loves public transport and travelling on the Tube. I always go by bus; you can be up high and see the world.

Her Elizabeth is so genius. It's just fabulous and, in its comedic, excessive way, there is a lot of accuracy there.

When you do Shakespeare they think you must be intelligent because they think you understand what you're saying

It's never been confirmed that Elizabeth was a virgin. It's like the Virgin Mary - it's about branding, a logo. To use a modern term, Elizabeth was actually a bit of a slut.

hoping something would leap magically from the canvas into me. 'Who are you? Where are you?' I'd shout over and over.

The most difficult thing about shooting guns instantly on film is to not pull a silly face while the gun is going off, because it's always a bit of a shock. So you find yourself sticking your tongue out or blinking or whatever. So the hardest thing is to keep a straight face while you're shooting a gun.

As an actor, those are the roles that you long for. You always want something that's going to kick your last role out of the water and put you off on a new path.

I used to look out the window of my bedroom as a kid, and there were these stars that, in my mind, made a big "A" in the sky. I thought my destiny was to go there.

I'm not beautiful; I clean up nice.

I became an actress because I discovered the world of the imagination when I was about 14 or so and the concept that you could engage in this amazing world of storytelling. I saw a production of Hamlet, and I didn't know Hamlet died in the end.

I knew I wanted to engage in the world of the imagination, but it was not economically feasible for me to study acting, so I went to a teachers' training college.

It's a mystery that thing about chemistry because often people who hate each other in real life and hate each other on the set have great chemistry on the screen. And people who love each other in real life and love each other on the set have absolutely no chemistry whatsoever.

The French always seemed to be so chic. The food was better, the clothes were better, the makeup was better, the hair was better. Everything was better in France.

What you want is a comfortable environment that you feel you can invent in. Because film is such a lumbering, technical, huge, great Neanderthal thing, it's hard to create that little space of peace, and calm, and creativity, and ease. That's what you want the director to create for you, so that when you walk on the set, you forget all of that, and the fact that it's costing gazillions of dollars a second.

Southend is a dormitory town for London. But it also had this thing of being the playground of the East End - a glamorous holiday town.

My grandfather had come over as a member of the czarist army, to make an arms deal with the British government. Being a blinkered military man, he was unaware that the Russian Revolution was about to take place.

Once a film gets into production, the actors sometimes begin to have more input than a writer does.

Women are always self-effacing and self-denying. There's a term that enrages me, and I always used to swear that I'd never play characters described that way. The term is "long-suffering."

I woke up one day and realized I could never be an American.

There's a heartbeat in any country that carries on regardless - at least in Europe. That's what worries me about America, because I'm not sure what that heartbeat is - unless it's the heartbeat of someone who's just arrived, who just ran over the border two weeks ago.

Words can be used for venal purposes. Words are incredible sources of propaganda and can cause terrible havoc.

Ill-informed intuition is fantastic - it's what great art is. So really old painters or writers or actors are brilliant, because they've finally reached the point when they can let go of al technique.

A woman with knowledge is something that frightens the status quo quite a lot.

I love photography and I love the art of photography. So when I'm working with high-level art photographers, I give them artistic freedom because I want that for myself when it's my turn to do my work and I never try and control it or say I'll only do this or I want it like that.

When I'm choosing projects to be a part of it's always a combination of so many different things. The primary thing is the director. But a very important element is, is it different enough from anything else I've ever done, or what I've last done.

I certainly think that he [Alan Rickman] was a kind of actor who needed to grow into his maturity to realize the potential, the huge potential that he had.

Love thy neighbor is difficult. That's why everybody - wars, you know. It's the hardest. And it's the most important. And respect thy neighbor. Love and respect. It means respect, really. Respect thy neighbor. Respect the other, the different.

I hate people eating on film. I hate it even worse on the radio, when people eat on the radio. I just can't stand it.

The timing of comedy is so difficult. You've got to leave room for a laugh, you don't want to kill the laugh, but on film, you can't just suddenly stop for a laugh and then carry on. So, I think it's a real art form, comedy on film.

What I feel personally and what I can act are two different things. Maybe one of the great pleasures of my job is being able to inhabit worlds that you are never going to inhabit personally.

Like journalists. The police have an extremely sick sense of humor, very guarded, very private, very male, which they need to survive on an everyday level. I don't think anyone has ever managed to tap that on the screen - it would actually be too shocking.

Acting is acting, but acting is different in almost always every project, and very, very different in this context.

Writers can get very angry when an actor says, "I don't know, I don't feel very comfortable with this line." Sometimes though, you're working with a writer for whom that is simply not apt - like Harold Pinter.

English actors feel vaguely apologetic for being there at all. American actors know that the most important thing is to get one take out of fifty that is great, and they'll go to any length to get it. The English are used to working within consistently small, low-budget things and think, I mustn't waste their time.

Directors always used to be like the police to me - the enemy, the people to tell me what to do when I didn't want to do it. But I've lived with one for a while now and I guess I can put myself more in their position. You shouldn't be too sympathetic to them.

You know, some actors, all of their potential is in their youth, and when that passes, their qualities of as an actor pass. But he - Alan [Rickman] was the opposite, and their are other actors who are like that, who, really, their potential is in maturity

You know, he [Alan Rickman] played these very reserved, sometimes-cold, sometimes-threatening characters on the screen, but the reality of the man was incredible warmth and humor and generosity and wicked fun.

I think we all have a dream of what it would be like not to work and grow heir loom tomatoes, and I do have that dream. It would be lovely. I do love gardening and all of that, but I do love my work.

It has nothing to do with clothing or makeup. Just put your shoulders back and chin up, and face the world with pride.

Right after winning the Oscar, when everyone was going home, they let these little gold Oscary shapes flutter down from the ceiling. Leonardo DiCaprio came over, bowed down, and kissed my hand. It was the most fabulous moment - such a lovely gesture. He didn't say anything.

I always tell my husband, That's it, I quit, I've done all I wanted, and he's just like, Yeah, yeah. Sure.

I loathe, I hate, chick flicks.

I don't mind being sexy, but on my terms. To this day, I love sexuality. I love the art of sexuality. I love Lady Gaga and the performance of sexuality. The mysterious, the artistic and the slightly perverse. I'm interested in all that.

I think still it is very fine not to want children. There are far too many people in the world. It is my contribution to ecology

When you're 16, you think 28 is so old! And then you get to 28 and it's fabulous. You think, then, what about 42? Ugh! And then 42 is great. As you reach each age, you gain the understanding you need to deal with it and enjoy it.

Where does this guy's ambition go? That's very peculiar. I think he's a very disturbing person, I think he's a very disturbing politician. Personally, I feel his interest is a self-interest

The important thing is to bring people with Parkinson's into our world and for the public to have a real understanding of it, as they've beginning to have with autism.

I love that country [Israel].

I'm a naturist at heart. I love being on beaches where everyone is naked. Ugly young people, beautiful old people, whatever. It's so unsexual and so liberating....

You have to allow life to play itself out.

When I was making films [early in my career] there were very, very few female directors, and there were certainly no women on set, which made taking one's clothes off all the more difficult

It's very easy to just shout: 'Off with their heads!' Maybe in doing that you might lose something very valuable. I would like to see the monarchy continue, but in a more democratic fashion.

It's great to be queen!

It's outrageous. It's ridiculous. And 'twas ever thus. We all watched James Bond as he got more and more geriatric, and his girlfriends got younger and younger. It's so annoying.

I don't see that anybody needs to earn $12 million for three months' work, quite honestly.

I've not won different awards - many, many times - so luckily I've practiced that whenever you are nominated for anything, you enter into this marvelous, fantabulous bubble called the bubble of nomination. The minute the envelope is opened and your name isn't called out, the bubble bursts. And no one calls you up the next day to say, 'So sorry you didn't win,' or 'You looked gorgeous - nothing. If you win, you get about another 24 hours in that lovely bubble and then - pop - you are slightly wet all over from the bubble and realize that you have to get on with real life.

I believe that if you want to go make your mark on the world you've got to go out and do it. Don't be shy, be adventurous.

As you get older naked stuff [on film] gets easier. It's more to do with the role than what men in the audience think. There's a liberation about it.

In Shakespeare's day it was women who were being burned at the stake as witches... not men. The men were thought of as alchemists. But women doing the same thing would be a witch and would be burned.

Americans are very good at animating voices. I don't know why. They have a freedom with them that we British actors find more difficult to get to.

I always feel when you work with an artist and whenever I work with a really good photographer, I try to give him or her their own artistic freedom because that's the way you get the best work or at least the most interesting work.

I don't know who I am. But I do know who I'm not. I have occasionally tried playing people I'm definitely not, and that wasn't a very pleasant experience.

With that incredible voice that he [Alan Rickman] could play like a sort of wonderful instrument, like a cello or something. He played his voice, and he could be the most subtle of actors. And he could also be quite a big actor. He could do the grandiose performances as well.

I feel the written word, poetry and literature is just one of the most beautiful things that human beings do. So we have to fight for it.

It was not my destiny, I kept thinking it would be, waiting for it to happen, but it never did, and I didn't care what people thought ... It was only boring old men who would ask me. And whenever they went, 'What? No children? Well, you'd better get on with it, old girl,' I'd say 'No! F*** off!'

You have to go through the long, painful process of learning techniques to be able to recognize a "good accident" or a "bad accident."

Fresh from a costume fitting, where I had been posing in front of the mirror assuming what I thought was a strong position - arms folded, butch-looking...you know - I met with the woman in charge of Holloway police station. She gave me the most invaluable advice: never let them see you cry, and never cross your arms. When I asked why, she said 'because it is a defensive action and therefore weak.

I'm a would-be rebel. The good girl who'd like to be a bad one.

Los Angeles is Hollywood and Hollywood is Hollywood Blvd. It's the first thing you want to see. It's the only thing really that you know about as far as Los Angeles is concerned. And so you go and you look at Joan Crawford's hands and feet and the whole history of American filmmaking is encapsulated in that one little area on that one street. That street, to me, has always been the street of dream.

Being me right now is sort of amazing.

You could build three hospitals with the cost of one film and I take that very seriously.

When I was about 25, I went to a hand reader, this Indian guy in a funky neighborhood. He said: The height of your success won't happen until you're in your late 40s.

Love is a command to rise to one's highest potential ... the best and noblest vision of ourselves. Love is a reward. The greatest we can earn. Granted to us for the moral qualities we have achieved in our lives.

Being powerful is so much more interesting than being beautiful.

Fear can be one of the most destructive emotions. It is, of course, also very important, in that fear sometimes stops you from doing stupid things. But it can also stop you from doing creative or exciting or experimental things. It can cloud your judgement of others, and lead to all kinds of evil. The control and understanding of our personal fears is one of the most important undertakings of our lives.

The hardest period in life is one’s twenties. It’s a shame because you’re your most gorgeous, and you’re physically in peak condition. But it’s actually when you’re most insecure and full of self-doubt. When you don’t know what’s going to happen, it’s frightening.

You write your life story by the choices you make,

I don't think there's anything on this planet that more trumpets life that the sunflower. For me that's because of the reason behind its name. Not because it looks like the sun but because it follows the sun. During the course of the day, the head tracks the journey of the sun across the sky. A satellite dish for sunshine. Wherever light is, no matter how weak, these flowers will find it. And that's such an admirable thing. And such a lesson in life.

It seems to me that the years between eighteen and twenty-eight are the hardest, psychologically. It’s then you realize this is make or break, you no longer have the excuse of youth, and it is time to become an adult – but you are not ready.

Women have got to stop being polite. If I ever had children, which I don't, the first thing I'd teach a girl of mine is the words 'f - off.'