There's an interview with the wonderful Helen Mirren in the Guardian here.

As a style icon, Mirren is always the one I look out for at Oscar frock time (this year she was faultless, as usual - this time in gunmetal satin with sleeves) but I've admired her work for a long time. 

By the time she fought with Michael Parkinson (a professional-Northerner twat, if you ask me) in 1975, she was already a familiar face, so I think I must have first encountered her in O Lucky Man in 1973 or thereabouts. I was 10.

By the time she was in The Long Good Friday, she was already a star - her steely-willed power-behind-the-throne performance opposite Bob Hoskins has always stuck firmly in my memory, along with an interview with her in The Sunday Times, which I cut out and kept, where she casually said that Sunday was usually a day for having sex (a comment I found as endearing as later, when interviewed by Ruby Wax, she confided with a guffaw that her former lover, Liam Neeson, was a 'BIG' man in every way). 

Mirren, after playing Jane Tennison in a million series, and the Queen (a fine performance in a pedestrian piece), is now firmly a British national institution and, like Maggie Smith, Judi Dench and Eileen Atkins, her mere presence in a play or film is endorsement enough for me to part with my cash or time to watch it (Maxine Peake is beginning to have a simliar effect, along with younger but usually spot-on actresses such as Keira Knightly and Carey Mulligan, whose luminosity I first zoomed in on in Bleak House). 

For those who may not have seen it, check out Mirren in Gosford Park (one of my favourite movies), where her hawk-fierce, buttoned-down, viciously controlled housekeeper suddenly collapses like a wounded falcon in the wake of unbearable pain - a fabulous performance. Lawd bless 'er - I hope she lives to be 90.