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5 Facts You Didn’t Know About ‘The Queen’ Actress Dame Helen Mirren
Even though Helen Mirren stars in a movie titled The Good Liar, it doesn’t mean she is one. The 74-year-old icon recently opened up to Closer Weekly about her inability to tell a lie while attending the NYC premiere of the film.
“I’m not saying I’ve never lied. I’m sure I have,” she admitted at the event alongside costar Ian McKellan, a fellow Brit, when trying to think of her biggest untruth and failing to find one. “But actually telling a lie about myself, I’m always actually fairly truthful about myself. I’ve always been truthful about my age, I’ve never hidden my age.”
Well, since Helen has a penchant for telling the truth, it’s safe to assume we can believe most anything she says.
Scroll down to find out five facts you didn’t know about her!
I LOVE A ROYAL ROLE
Helen made her stage debut at 20 as the queen of Egypt in Antony and Cleopatra, won an Oscar as Elizabeth II in 2006’s The Queen and plays the titular Russian empress in HBO’s new miniseries Catherine the Great. “I don’t mind if I don’t have any lines as long as I get to wear a crown,” she once joked.
I’D NEVER MADE A MOVIE WITH IAN MCKELLEN BEFORE
Although they’d costarred on Broadway, the actors hadn’t shared the screen until The Good Liar, the tale of a wealthy widow and a con man — opening November 15. “It’s a wonderful, twisty thriller,” Helen recently told Entertainment Weekly. “It’s nice to do a film about old people that’s not about Alzheimer’s or cancer.”
I WAS LIAM NEESON’S REAL-LIFE LOVE INTEREST
“We didn’t date — we lived together for four years,” Helen said on The Graham Norton Show in 2018 of her leading man in 1981’s Excalibur. “We were a serious item for a while. Lucky me!”
I DIDN’T GET MARRIED UNTIL I WAS IN MY 50s.
“I have nothing against marriage — it just wasn’t to my taste, like turnips,” Helen, who wed director Taylor Hackford in 1997, told AARP the Magazine in 2016. “It took me a very long time to come round to acquiring the taste. I just had to meet the right turnip.”
I DON’T REGRET BEING CHILDLESS
Motherhood “was not my destiny,” she told The Telegraph in 2013. “I kept thinking it would be, waiting for it to happen, but it never did, and I didn’t care what people thought.” She did admit that after watching the 1989 movie Parenthood, “I sobbed for about 20 minutes [but] I got over it.”
For more on your favorite stars, pick up the latest issue of Closer Weekly, on newsstands now — and be sure to sign up for our newsletter for more exclusive news!
