Helen Mirren Movies and Career Information

Dame Helen Mirren, DBE (born 26 July 1945) is an English actor. She has won an Academy Award, four SAG Awards, four BAFTAs, three Golden Globes, four Emmy Awards, and two Cannes Film Festival Best Actress Awards during her career. Mirren was born Helen Lydia Mironoff in a corridor of the maternity wing of Queen Charlotte's Hospital, Chiswick, in West London. Her father, Vasiliy Petrovich Mironov (1913–1980), was of Russian origin, and her mother, Kathleen Alexandrina Eva Matilda (née Rogers; 1909–1996), was English. Mirren's paternal grandfather, Pyotr Vassilievich Mironov, a Russian nobleman, tsarist colonel and diplomat, was negotiating an arms deal in Britain and was stranded there, along with his family, during the Russian Revolution. Her father called himself Basil and changed the family name to Mirren in the 1950s. He played the viola with the London Philharmonic before World War II, and later drove a cab and was a driving-test examiner, before becoming a civil servant with the Ministry of Transport. Mirren's mother was from West Ham, London, and was the thirteenth of fourteen children born to a butcher whose father had been the butcher to Queen Victoria. Mirren considers her