Helen Mirren

In 1969 John Goldschmidt was a young documentary maker in search of his next subject. A graduate of the Czech National Film School and the Royal College of Art, he had already attracted attention with a TV film about Bernadette Devlin, at the time the youngest woman ever elected to the Westminster Parliament. His choice next fell on 24-year-old Helen Mirren, youngest Associate Artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Speaking to me recently, Goldschmidt recalled the exact circumstances:

I’d made the film about Bernadette Devlin, partly filmed during the Londonderry riots, which was very controversial. I was looking for something completely different, and my ex-wife had a copy of Vogue. There was an article and photos of Helen Mirren. I suddenly thought that she’d make a good subject for a documentary film.

It was a happy conjunction: one rising talent documenting the rise of another. At the time, ATV was the commercial television company with a licence covering the Midlands and as such felt an obligation towards the Stratford-based RSC. With ATV’s boss Lew Grade on side, the project was set up quickly, in two or three weeks. Lest any viewer complain that they’d never heard of the young thespian, an ATV official assured the Sun that ‘she is very much an up-and-coming Shakespearian actress and a very dolly lady. She’s going places.’

The resulting film, Doing Her Own Thing (the, now rather dated, title was the company’s idea), aired across the ITV network on 23 June 1970. Long thought to be lost, the master copy has resurfaced recently in the ITV archives. Viewed after nearly fifty years, it’s both a fascinating time-capsule of a distant era and a picture of a hard-working actress at the outset of her career. The impression given onscreen is of someone articulate, grounded and self-aware, even as she expresses in voiceovers the necessary uncertainties of youth:

It's quite impossible to say what’s going to happen to me. I even find it impossible to say what has happened to me […] I don’t know what I’ll be doing in three years’ time, or even in a year’s time. I’ve absolutely no idea.

Although Goldschmidt’s early speciality was what he calls the ‘portrait documentary’, he also harboured a desire to make drama. His compromise in the Mirren film was to capture events from her present life, film her in performance, and get her to re-enact episodes from her earlier life. Thus we see her first ‘starring role’ (impersonated here by a young girl) as Gretel in a primary school Hansel and Gretel. Then, playing herself as a teenager, she whiles away evenings with friends in coffee bars, and secretly dreams of being ‘discovered’ as she walks the Essex seafront. She returns to the Kursaal Amusement Park in her hometown of Southend, where she worked as an attendant on the famous ‘Rotor Wheel’, a giant spinning tub which pins pleasure-seekers to the wall by centrifugal force. By now her taste for the theatrical is developing apace. Without telling her parents – fearing their disapproval – she travels to London to audition for the National Youth Theatre; Michael Croft, the NYT’s cheery, avuncular director, re-enacts his enthusiasm for the young performer as she delivers her audition piece from Henry VI Part 3, the withering ‘molehill’ speech in which Queen Margaret humiliates the captured York (I.iv.66-78).

Al Parker, veteran theatrical agent, next puts in appearance, recalling how he first signed her to his agency before then launching into a rambling anecdote about Rudolph Valentino. To the soundtrack of Al Bowlly (‘You Oughta Be In Pictures’), a starry-eyed Mirren gazes into shop windows. ‘Suddenly roads seemed to be opening out in front of me,’ she muses. She joins the Royal Shakespeare Company. There follow scenes in a Stratford churchyard filmed late in October (as Goldschmidt fretted about the fading light). Cycling along Warwickshire lanes to the tune of ‘Greensleeves’, she recalls days of ‘quiet, calm fun with another actor in the countryside’. This same actor, Bruce Myers, helps her re-enact their amorous horseplay among the costumes of the Stratford wardrobe department.

Moving to the present, we see what she calls the sheer ‘technical slog’ of working in classical repertory. The learning of lines, the physical exercises (‘Reach… and contract!’), and – perhaps most interesting – one-on-one voice production work with the RSC’s specialist Kate Fleming. At this point Mirren was rehearsing Lady Anne in Richard III for opening in April 1970. These lines seem to cause her particular difficulty:

The which thou once didst bend against her breast
But that thy brothers beat aside the point. (I.ii.97-8)

I asked Ben Crystal, who with his father David has worked extensively on reconstructing Elizabethan speech, whether these lines would have been easier to deliver in Shakespeare’s ‘Original Pronunciation’ (‘OP’) than they were in Mirren’s very proper Received Pronunciation (modern ‘RP’). Ben, himself an actor, thought not. He pointed to the aspiration of the wh in ‘which’ and the pronunciation of ‘once’ as ohnce as distinctively OP features, but found ‘nothing particularly difficult about the line in either RP or OP’ in his mouth. David Crystal, a linguistician, shared my sense that there was a tongue-twister lying in wait here: ‘If she was trying to articulate every consonant, then she could have had a problem with dstb [‘didst bend’]. In OP the consonant cluster for -st endings would have been simplified, by dropping the t, as can be seen in some spellings of the period.’

Another scene catches her at a photo session. While she poses winningly for the camera, her voiceover strikes a self-deprecating note: ‘I honestly and truly don’t find myself attractive… I have a basically very ordinary face and it’s not going to make my fortune.’ This was a time when she still relished her anonymity: ‘I wouldn’t be recognised walking down the street or asked for my autograph. I think I prefer it that way.’ She leads an isolated life as a jobbing actress, she tells us, with marriage far from her thoughts, but still she’s a ‘1970 girl’ who feels she should be demonstrating against apartheid. Immersion in Shakespeare has made her all too aware that women in sixteenth-century England led lives far more restricted than her own. ‘They were used very much as pawns,’ she reflects. ‘They had no political say, and I find that I rebel against it.’

Crucial to the documentary was to capture her in performance, engaging in what she calls the ‘big lovely deception’ of theatre. We see her pacing up and down in the wings, striving to ‘keep the energy going’ until her entrance. There are several extracts from Troilus and Cressida at the Aldwych: Mirren in heavy fake tan; Troilus (Michael Williams) clad in an alarmingly short chiton; Pandarus (David Waller), curly-wigged, the epitome of ‘camp’. In order to secure close-ups, Goldschmidt filmed these scenes in the empty theatre in the afternoon, then intercut the footage with film of the audience arriving for the evening performance and applauding the curtain-calls. More endearing is a recreation of her early Cleopatra. In tight close-up on her face, she gives us the queen of the Nile among her attendants, brooding erotically on her absent lover:

O Charmian,
Where think'st thou he is now? Stands he, or sits he?
Or does he walk? Or is he on his horse?
O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony! (I.v.19-22)

Reviews were generally favourable. The Sunday Telegraph welcomed a glimpse of this ‘Shakespearian nymph’ with the ‘arresting, tilted profile’, noting that Goldschmidt was ‘refreshingly unafraid’ to use the ‘old-fashioned’ technique of re-enactment. The Daily Mirror was full of praise for the young director’s ‘technical wizardry’, deployed in the service of a rising star: ‘nobody exalts the artist like another one.’ The Daily Sketch’s critic came ‘prepared to be harrowed with the usual heartbreak’ of the showbiz tale, but instead found ‘gaiety all the way’, with Mirren’s ‘a face like a promising new day’. When television shone a spotlight on show business, the Daily Express observed, it usually gave ‘a reflection of an unreal world jangling with highly paid people.’ However, in this ‘affectionate’ documentary, ‘it was refreshing to discover someone of such potential who cared far more about her work than a Rolls Royce.’ The Times admired how the young actress’s ‘honest self-knowledge’ and pointed opinions emerged with clarity from the film but regretted that the extracts from Troilus and Cressida ‘did not allow her to be more than attractive and efficient.’ The Guardian was not alone in spotting that the director seemed more than a little in love with his subject – ‘in another age John Goldschmidt might have written sonnets’ – but concluded that ‘she emerged with considerable dignity from the film’. A rare voice of dissent was the Daily Telegraph, for whom this was ‘one of those remorselessly “pop” productions’ seemingly organised by a ‘berserk cameraman, with commentary added later. It scampered frenziedly round the externals of its subject without really getting to grips with the actuality.’ George Melly, writing in the Observer, was also unconvinced. ‘A prettily photographed but empty little essay,’ he announced. ‘What she had to say about her life and profession was the opposite of riveting.’

Goldschmidt, these days a multiple award-winner with feature films as well as documentaries to his credit, remains proud of this early work. He recalls that it drew plaudits from Trevor Nunn, and Mirren herself acknowledges that it raised her profile at this point in her career. The director found his subject easy to work with, he tells me – an impression confirmed by a surviving set of photos taken during shooting on a blustery Southend Pier in 1970. They record actress and film-maker in relaxed, close confab: two young people, suspended in their time-capsule, little suspecting what the future will bring.

But listen to how Mirren describes this era in an interview with Noreen Taylor a quarter-century later:

Between 18 and 30 were the worst years of my life. I tried never to show it by just getting on with things, but during those decades I cried myself to sleep most nights simply because I felt afraid of what was ahead, of the unknown. I’ve talked about this to other women and found that it was similar for them. Odd, isn’t it, when you consider that at the time you’re at your physical best, in reality there is all the misery and fear of wondering what is to become of you. (The Times, 19 September 1996)

In retrospect we (re)write our autobiographies, placing an interpretation on events that wasn’t apparent at the time. Which is the more valid – how we felt at the time, or how we feel decades later? The joie de vivre radiating from the young Mirren in Goldschmidt’s film, or the sober stocktaking by her older self? Whatever we are in the second half of life will incorporate whatever we were in the first, yet in between lies that long, unpredictable process of ‘becoming’.

[This is an extract from my ebook, Becoming Helen Mirren (2019), available from Amazon UK, Amazon US, iBooks, Google Play, Barnes & Noble, etc. My thanks to John Goldschmidt for the photos used here and for other assistance.]