Raunchy new role for Helen? - Oct 17 2007
Dame Helen Mirren scooped an Oscar for her role as the Queen, but the actress is apparently taking on quite a different challenge for her next part.

The 62-year-old is set to play a brothel madam in Love Ranch, directed by her husband Taylor Hackford, reports the Daily Express.

"I've developed this project for a long time and one of the things that excited me most was the chance to work again with my wife," Taylor apparently told the paper.

"I had to beg! She's a very busy girl. She wouldn't agree unless it was a great role - and it is a great role."

Taylor, 62, has movie credits including the Oscar-winning Ray and The Devil's Advocate.

His latest project, Love Ranch, tells the true story of America's first legalised brothel, which opened in Nevada during the 1970s.

Helen will star opposite Joe Pesci in the movie when filming begins in January.



Helen ’cried’ over Queen clothes - Oct 10 2007
Dame Helen Mirren has apparently revealed that she cried when she first saw the dowdy clothes she had to wear to play the Queen.

The 62-year-old actress, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of Elizabeth II in The Queen, reportedly told the Cheltenham Literature Festival: "There were brown shoes, tweed skirts, Barbour jackets and handmade scarves."

She is quoted by the Daily Mirror as saying: "I cried, literally cried. I thought, ’I can’t pretend to be someone I don’t understand who would choose these clothes’."

But, luckily, the quality of the outfits, and her understanding of the Queen’s attitude towards them, won through.

"If it was a tweed skirt, it was the best you could get. I grew to love portraying someone so unlike me, who is not vain," she said.

"She has no vanity. She has all the jewellery in the world but she is happiest in an old skirt and wellies."


Dame Helen is ’nudist at heart’ - Sept 27 2007
Dame Helen Mirren may be 62 - but it seems she has no plans to stop stripping off.

The Oscar-winner, who has taken her clothes off in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover and more recently in Calendar Girls, apparently said she enjoys baring all, reports the Daily Express.

"I am a nudist at heart," the paper quoted her as saying.

"I have been to many nudist beaches. It is amazing how quickly feelings of self-consciousness disappear.

"Of course it only works if everyone else is naked too."

She also reportedly revealed she has no plans to add a no-nudity clause to her work.

"I have never said ’never again’ to nudity and I am not going to," she said.

The actress recently admitted that getting naked got easier as you got older.

"As you get older, the naked stuff gets easier because it’s more to do with the role than what the men in the audience are thinking. There’s a liberation about it," she explained.


Dame Helen mortified over palace ’snub’ - May 10 2007
Dame Helen Mirren said she was "mortified" today following reports that she was "too busy" to have dinner with the Queen.

The British star, who scooped the best actress Oscar for her performance in box office hit The Queen this year, said she tried to rearrange the shooting of her new film National Treasure but that it was not possible.

The 61-year-old denied that she snubbed the Queen’s invitation to Buckingham Palace.

"I am mortified," Dame Helen is quoted by the New York Post as saying.