Mirren

London, Feb. 26: Helen Mirren’s Oscar triumph may encourage producers and directors “not to write off older actresses”, it was suggested in London today.

The 61-year-old veteran British actress, whose varied career in film and television stretches back four decades, won an Oscar last night for her lead role in The Queen.

Mirren plays Queen Elizabeth in the week following Princess Diana’s death in 1997 when the royal family had to confront a mood of mounting hostility to the monarchy.

The queen is now 80 which means Mirren had to be made up to look 10 years older than her own age.

Spanish actress Penelope Cruz (right) with her sister Monica at the Vanity Fair Oscar party in Hollywood on Sunday. (Reuters)

Mirren, who is said to have looked practically regal herself last night in a champagne scoop-necked frock by Christian Lacroix, thanked the monarch with whom she will be taking tea in a few days at Buckingham Palace.

Commentators said today that Mirren has done more to rehabilitate the standing of the monarchy than an army of palace flunkies and public relations officers.

Having collected a string of best actress awards for The Queen, at the Baftas, the Golden Globes and the Venice Film Festival, she was also expected to win the Oscar. In her acceptance speech she paid tribute to the real Queen. “For 50 years and more, Elizabeth Windsor has maintained her dignity, her sense of duty — and her hairstyle,” said Mirren. “She has had her feet planted firmly on the ground, her hat on her head and her handbag on her arm.

“She has weathered many, many storms. And I salute her courage and her consistency and I thank her because if it wasn’t for her I most certainly would not be here.”

She ended her speech by holding up the Oscar statuette and saying: “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Queen.”

It was a case of third time lucky for Mirren at the Oscars. She has twice been nominated before, in 1995 for The Madness Of King George and for Gosford Park in 2002. In 2003 she was made a Dame of the British Empire.

It remains to be seen whether the Indian film industry, too, will take heart from trends in Hollywood and experiment with better roles for more experienced actresses. Although this is more for political reasons, Sonia Gandhi has so far resisted attempts by the director Jagmohun Mundhra to make a biopic about her.

in which she would have been played by the Italian Monica Bellucci.

The London-based director Ahmed Jamal, whose documentary The Journalist and the Jihadi is being entered for an Emmy and who has advised Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie on the movie the couple are making about the American journalist Daniel Pearl, said: “There is certainly a move towards better roles for older women. I am constantly told by actresses in their late thirties to fifties that there aren’t enough roles for them.

“The problem is that filmmakers think that younger people, the MTV generation, go to cinema and this influences the ads. But my opinion is that there is a need to make more mature films for mature viewers. Helen Mirren’s role is a specific story about the queen. But her success will encourage more people not to write off older actresses.”

It should be stressed, however, that Mirren could rely on a superb script written by Peter Morgan and also had a perfect foil in a talented British actor, Michael Sheen, who plays a youthful Tony Blair. As Britain today bathed in Mirren’s Oscar glory, the real life Tony Blair said from 10, Downing Street: “It takes a very special actress to take on a role of this kind and to do so to universal acclaim. Helen Mirren is a very special kind of actress and her Oscar is richly deserved.”

Such a comment in praise of older women may help society in general and the television and film industry in particular to re-examine its obsession with youth.

The trend towards older actresses was remarked upon by the Independent newspaper which noted before the Oscars were announced: “The category generating the greatest excitement is Best Actress. Will it be a bare-knuckle fight between Dames Helen Mirren (The Queen) and Judi Dench (Notes on a Scandal)? Or will Annette Bening, playing a bipolar mother in Running with Scissors be the surprise winner? And don’t forget Meryl Streep as the supremely bitchy magazine editor in The Devil Wears Prada.”

The paper said: “In the era of the multiplex blockbuster, when adolescent boys have become the most important target audience, good roles for women have been depressingly scarce. (But) not only were there better roles for women than at any time in the past decade, all the leading contenders for Best Actress are over 45 – and none is playing a babe role.”

“I think it's very hopeful,” Notes on a Scandal director Richard Eyre told the paper, “because we seem to be getting away from this ditzy celebration of celebrity and ‘the next new thing’. There’s an obsession with juvenilia, and 40-year-olds trying to look 20. I find it encouraging that experience and at least the illusion of wisdom is welcome. On the whole, people get more interesting, the older they get.”

Although there was genuine delight at Mirren’s success, there was discernible relief last night in Hollywood when Martin Scorsese finally had his Oscar for The Departed, a gangster movie. It took him 26 years, six directing nominations and two screenplay nominations.