by Helen Mirren
My first performance, as I recall, was as the Virgin Mary. I was about six years old. I had no lines but I did have a gorgeous blue veil with stars all over it. I remember that veil so well. It gave me an everlasting love of costume. All I had to do was sit there. The perfect role! I wish they had all been that easy. Sit tight, don’t move, say nothing and let the costume do all the work.
My next role introduced me to the ever present and inevitable unfairness of my eventually chosen profession, especially the casting process. By this time I was about eight. My class had been told to line up and walk in an orderly manner to the hall. As usual, I was one of the last to get into line. When we got to the hall it transpired that this was the casting call for the production of Four and Twenty Blackbirds that was to be our class’s contribution to the school’s end-of-year show. The teacher started at the beginning of the line: ‘You will be the king, you the queen, you the princess, you the cook, you the prince, you the chamberlain …’ and, pointing at the rest of the line, ‘all the rest of you the blackbirds!’
Weeks later, hunched under the pie crust with twenty-three other eight-year-olds in ill-fitting black leotards, inhaling that distinctive odour of smelly plimsolls, waiting our cue to pop out and hearing the princess, wearing pink and gold and wearing a crown say her words badly … well, my resentment knew no bounds. However, it was good early training for a career where I would often lose a part to a prettier person, or to someone who was at the front of the line while I was at the back.
My parting performance at Hamlet Court primary was the lead role in Hansel and Gretel. You would think I’d have been grateful, but I wasn’t. I was terrified, because the lines all came in a book, a slim, red, cloth-bound book that I remember to this day. I could not imagine that it was possible to learn that many lines. I begged my mother to get me out of it. She wisely refused. To this day when I look at a play my heart sinks, as I cannot believe I will be able to learn all those lines.
In fact I was never the kind of little girl who naturally loves to perform, or rather be looked at. Embarrassment came easily to me and acting, even in my schooldays, was more to do with disappearing than ‘look at me’. Even now, my relationship with the audience is ambivalent. I am vaguely embarrassed by the idea of being looked at, have to put it out of my mind and get swept away by the imaginative world the audience is allowing me to engage with.
At home, away from these traumas, life was poor but sweet. We also had no central heating, of course, and our house was freezing cold in the winter. I remember ice on the inside of the windows in our bedrooms and the tiny bathroom. My mother would struggle every morning trying to light the voracious coal-fired boiler that supplied our hot water, and then the coal fire that was our only source of heat. It was there I learned to light a fire – a useful skill – with the help of nuggets of paper and then more paper held over the front of the fireplace.
When I was younger we had no washing machine, no car, and no refrigerator. The butter would sit in a bowl of water and the meat in a ‘meat-safe’ – a mesh cover that kept the flies off. I can’t remember when we got a fridge for the first time but it must have been a momentous day for my mother. We had no television in my house, until after I left home for college, and no radio to speak of. We did have an enormous thing called a ‘radiogram’ that was the size of a coffin and seemed to take up most of the living room yet serve no purpose; the radio bit hardly worked and we only had about three records to play on it, one being Peter and the Wolf, which I can still sing bits of. My mother was a total musical snob, although unmusical herself, and we were only allowed to listen to classical music, which meant that when I first heard Elvis I almost fainted.
My Russian grandfather came to live with us, and we also had Brutus the dog, who’d originally belonged to my flighty Auntie Olga, and a sweet cat called Tiddles.
Aunt Olga was my father’s younger sister, born in Britain and very beautiful, in an earthy Russian way. She had been a chorus girl in London, working at the Windmill briefly, before marrying first a successful car salesman and then the successful East End villain George Dawson.
From her first marriage she had a daughter, my impossibly beautiful and kind cousin Tania, who became a supermodel in the early sixties, just before the rise of Twiggy. Tania and Olga, along with my Russian grandmother (who by then had long since left my grandfather), lived a very glamorous life in comparison to ours. They sailed in yachts off the South of France with Uncle George, sweeping into our life from time to time bearing gifts of cast-off clothing, items which were always expensive and lovely. I think Olga must have given my mother the bottle of French perfume that sat in the bottom of her wardrobe for many years, losing its smell, but treasured nonetheless.
My first leading role, as Gretel.
After distributing their gifts, Olga, Granny and Tania would head off again, leaving a whiff of perfume and corruption. George eventually did time for his misdeeds – fraud, mostly – serving about three years of a six-year sentence. I believe he was instrumental in the escape of one of the Great Train Robbers from prison. He was shocked by and disapproved of the rise of the violent London villains like the Kray twins. To him, villainy was all about the con, and using your brain rather than force. He was incapable of doing anything straight, even paying the butcher’s bill.
Cousin Tania survived this extraordinary upbringing and came out miraculously a loyal and generous person, educating her brothers with her earnings as a young model and always supporting her mother. Even so, Olga and Granny finished up in a council flat on the top floor of a high-rise block in Southend. Despite having lived all their lives in expensive hotels and glamorous rented apartments, they were perfectly happy there. It was the first place they could call home. Granny became very enamoured of the local Labour Party and council that had given her security at last. She went canvassing for them, which, as her English was very bad, and spoken with a very strong Russian accent, must have been disconcerting for the people she door-stepped in those Cold War days.
My sister, Katherine, known now as Kate, is a couple of years older than me and my brother, Peter, was three years younger. Peter was in fact christened Peter Basil, like his grandfather and great-great-grandfather, following on the Russian family tradition.
My sister was and is for ever my Big Sister to whom I will always defer. She is my best friend. She was the one I shared my first bedroom with. One night, she recalls me, still asleep, getting into her bed on top of her, and continuing to sleep uninterrupted. She was the one who first had to walk me to primary school; a walk that must have taken about half an hour. She was the big girl at St Bernard’s Convent, smoothing my path there. And she was the one who had to fight all the first teenage battles with my parents, once again making my passage easier when my turn came.
Growing up in a small house with no money or resources led to many conflicts between my sister and myself, almost always due to my appropriation of articles belonging to her: hair slides, skirts, pencils. We had to fight for our space, and all three of us did. It’s strange, but while living in the closest of physical circumstances, we nonetheless led completely different lives. Kate loved sailing and went off crewing in races on little sailing dinghies while I hung around art galleries. It was only after we left the circumscribed environment of the house in Leigh that we could see and love each other fully.
My sister was the first to leave home, going off to London, the big city that was always singing its siren song for us from the other side of Dagenham. She got a place at a teachers’ training college, with rooms in Kensington. She was studying Home Economics, as it’s now known, and college launched her on a long, happy and successful career as a teacher. Two years later, I got into college (again, a teachers’ training school, where I studied Speech and Drama). I went to visit her and had the most extraordinary experience of falling in love with my own sister. In this new environment, I saw her clearly for the first time and loved what I saw, and ever since we have been very cl
ose. I’ve never had children, so my sister has generously shared her family with me, and now Kate, her son Simon and his three children form the centre of my life together with my husband and his two sons.
I loved my little brother Peter in spite of the fact that he was – or so it seemed to Kate and me – impossibly spoilt. For all my mother’s natural feminism, she couldn’t or wouldn’t accept the concept of boys doing housework, whereas it was required of us girls. I remember her trying to teach me how to iron a man’s shirt, which I resisted. Peter was also given a tiny boat, left by an uncle who died. In fact it went to the right person, because Peter became a very good sailor and won many races on the Thames. He sailed all of his adventuresome life. My brother was simply one of the most extraordinary people I have ever known, though as in the case of my sister, I didn’t really know him at home.
I remember that nasty moment when I realised he was bigger than me, and therefore no longer under my command. Just on the verge of banging his head against the wall, I suddenly noticed I was looking up at him. Quick change of plan! As I became a teenager, he turned into an impenetrable spotty, gangly pubescent, interested in bombs, boats and boy things. He was always out and about, and was the only one of us not intimidated by my mother’s caustic tongue. I remember some spectacular rows and banging doors that Kate and I could aspire to but never dare to emulate.
Having failed the Eleven-plus exam, Peter was destined for the kind of secondary school education that was more to do with carpentry than Latin. This was not necessarily a bad thing for him, for he was always practical, a man of action, not destined to become an intellectual, but he was nevertheless very clever. He went on to lead an extraordinary life of adventure working as an engineer, and later a trained commercial plane pilot. He also turned out to be an incredible storyteller. He had the potential to be a much better writer than Kate and myself, for all our studying of Shakespeare and Thomas Hardy. Sadly, the only writing he did was in letters home. He could make you cry with laughter at his stories of misadventure in exotic places.
For all his talent, the school he went to did not have the resources to teach someone like him, so he left when he was fifteen. At the age of sixteen he got a local girl pregnant. Back then, it was the all-time sin to either get pregnant or get someone else pregnant out of wedlock. Of course there was no birth control, or even sex education in schools. The girl was sent to one of those homes for unmarried pregnant girls run by well-meaning but rigid people. I visited her there. She was a lovely girl, smart and sensitive, and did not deserve this fate. Her child, a girl, was adopted. I often think of that niece of mine.
Not long afterwards my brother joined the army. I think my parents felt he was in danger of running completely wild, so he was encouraged to make this step, and to take a course in soil analysis while there. After about two years in the army he realised it was not for him and tried to leave, whereupon the army made it very difficult for him to get out. My parents fought for his right to leave, and they became part of a movement to change the law, stopping very young men from signing away their lives to the armed forces. This lobbying proved successful and the law was subsequently changed.
So Peter got out of the army and began a life of travel and amazing adventure. He went off to Africa – the Kalahari Desert, South Africa, New Guinea and Libya – building roads through some of the most inaccessible terrain in the world, in the kind of places where you have to hunt, kill and cook the food for the workforce each night. He worked with many different races in his time, but like Rider Haggard, his favourite people were the Zulu. He had many wonderful tales about them. He told me that the Zulu do not name a baby until its character has appeared, and ignore the given name of the people with whom they come in contact, preferring to find an appropriately descriptive name. Their name for him translated as ‘Where is he?’. It was a perfect name for him. He was never to be found where you expected.
Kate and me, ready for school. Overleaf: The cast of Hansel and Gretel.
Incredibly brave, somewhat foolhardy, ‘Where is he?’ often sailed, or flew, into dangerous waters. Having gained his private plane licence, he went on to qualify for a commercial pilot’s licence, which allowed him to indulge his love of flying. And on his travels he managed to get himself caught up in coups and all sorts of scraps. Funny and self-deprecating, opinionated and prejudiced, even though he wasn’t a drinker he loved to hang out in some of the dodgiest bars in the world, with some of the dodgiest men. Peter grabbed life by the balls. He was absolutely not destined for suburbia.
Maybe he inherited his father’s love of solitude. He didn’t need or want a family, and was not a good father to the only child he had (or, at least, the only officially acknowledged child), my lovely nephew Basil. Eventually he found the Philippines, fell in love with that country, and stopped travelling. It was there that he died, aged fifty-four, refusing to return to Britain for treatment.
I visited him there, eight years before he died, on my way back from the Tokyo Film Festival with Taylor. I found him obsessed with making the perfect bra for the many girlfriends he had, who worked in the various bars in the area. At that time the only bras available in the markets were sad, heavy, overstructured things. He spent hours hunched over a sewing machine, just like my parents making their sails, working out how to get various bits of nylon lace to fit together. Like Howard Hughes, he approached the job from an engineer’s point of view. He was also outraged because the Philippine government in Manila was closing down those girlie bars in the hope of regenerating the area. The girls in the bars and their mamasans had become his family. He could not deal with independent and successful women like his sisters. He was somewhat retrogressive in many of his attitudes.
Although I had not seen him since my father died about ten years previously, it was clear he did not really want me there. He arranged for us to stay in a hotel, far from his apartment, and on the first night suggested to Taylor that he should leave me in the hotel while the two of them headed off to some bars to pick up girls. He was taken aback when Taylor said he did not think that was a good idea.
Luckily, two things then happened. Taylor had to fly back to Tokyo to pick up an award he had won at the festival, and no sooner had he gone than a hurricane blew in and I was stuck; the airport was closed. I checked out of the hotel and presented myself at Peter’s doorstep. He had to take me in. I spent the next four days with him, loving him as much as ever and showing him I was still his family, and his big sister to boot.
That was the last time I saw him, and I am very grateful that I had at least that time with him.
My friend Geraldine and the look on her face when I betrayed her. It was an image that haunted me, and many years later I did this painting to try to confront my guilt.
I was never very good at school. Little did I know that my sum book was only the beginning of years of struggle.
I grew up as a young child in the post-war years under the restrictions of rationing. Probably just as well, as sweets were practically non-existent.
Here are a group of pictures from my childhood. A portrait by a professional, holding a borrowed toy, but posing nonetheless. A birthday party. I hated all birthday parties except the ones my parents gave. They were fun. Here we are with the neighbours that we played in the street with, and our cousin Tania, destined to be a top model.
Above: At this age I loved ballet, took lessons and even practised on my own. This picture was taken before going off to take a dancing exam. I was never that neat otherwise.
Top right: Me aged twelve.
Left: The house I spent my early years in, in Satanita Road.
Below: This picture, found in Moscow, shows my grandfather walking with my brother and Tiddles and Brutus – a family outing.
Our terrible slobbery dog, Brutus, that had been foisted on us by Auntie Olga. He loved the cat Tiddles. They would go for walks together, and Brutus looked after Tiddles’ kittens. They would sleep curled up between his legs and he ca
refully guarded them.
These pictures of my brother doing boy stuff caused much merriment. They encapsulate masculinity to me.
Tania lived a glittering life of lovely dresses, toys, sun and swimming pools. However, her life was also uncertain and insecure. She loved to visit with her cousins who lived a poorer, but more stable, life by the pebbly beaches and mud flats of the rainy Thames estuary. Later, as a young top model, she paid for her younger brothers’ education. She is an immensely kind and generous person. Here she is (left) with my grandfather on Southend beach.
Right: Dressed up to go out. We had few clothes apart from our uniforms.
The picture on the left is the last one of us all together before we went our separate ways, Kate and I to college and Peter into the army. The one above is the very last picture of the three of us together. Peter had come back from the Philippines for a brief visit.
Southend
Becoming an Essex Girl
After primary school I followed my sister’s example and passed that terrible and divisive exam called the Eleven-plus and thanks probably to the efforts of my parents, entered St Bernard’s Convent Grammar School. Being a parochial Roman Catholic school, it was thought of as one of the best in the neighbourhood. I don’t know how much soul-searching, or rather morality-searching, my atheist parents had to go through before reaching the conclusion that this was where they wanted their daughters to attend.
St Bernard’s was a convent for Bernardine nuns, who wore the full black robes with a white wimple. It was an enclosed order. The nuns’ lives were completely circumscribed by the school’s cramped grounds. To enter the school was to smell lavender polish and a faint whiff of incense. The halls were always immaculately polished, crucifixes and statues of the Virgin Mary placed all about. The only form of exercise those nuns had was to walk in pairs around and around a very small patch of grass. Years later, I revisited the school. The nuns were long gone, having been moved to another convent, and I was shown the bedrooms where they lived out their lives, behind the mysterious doors we were never allowed to pass through. They were minute cells with tiny windows. My admiration for them grew.