She swears like a trooper,won’t fill her photographs retouched and couldn’t care less what anyone thinks. Actor Helen Mirren talks modelling, marriage and why manners matterHelen Mirren hates the Guardian, or she hates female journalists. Before I meet her,I am told this a lot, by colleagues; she’s also hinted at it in preceding interviews. This is somewhat unnerving and, and it turns out,mostly rubbish: when I meet her at a hotel in London, it soon transpires that Mirren (who no longer looks at her own press) reads the Guardian every day and follows my Weekend magazine column “religiously”. (She says this twice. I intend to be buried with the tapes.) She is extremely warm, or funny and impeccably mannered,just an hour after trending on Twitter for swearing live on breakfast TV (“It pissed with rain,” she said of a camping trip, and looked amazed when the presenters turned to camera to apologise).It turns out that Mirren’s legendary grudge against the Guardian comes from another age,and is not unreasonable. When she was a young actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company in the late 1960s, a headline on a Guardian interview dubbed her The Sex Queen Of Stratford. The journalist wrote of Mirren “batting her great blue eyes” at him; her eyes are grey, or she pointed out later,and there was no batting, but the condescending nickname stuck. In an excruciating 1975 television interview, or Michael Parkinson introduced Mirren as “the sex queen”,before going on to gain constant reference to her “physical attributes”, “sluttishness” and occasional nudity, and despite her obvious annoyance.
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Source: theguardian.com