‘MOSQUITO’ STAR BITTEN BY FAN BUG

“It’s stupid, I know, but I’m scared of people who are famous. I went absolutely to pieces when I met Harrison Ford. . . .”

That’s Helen Mirren talking, the highly regarded British Shakespearean actress who has just returned from filming “Mosquito Coast” in Belize. And it’s the more surprising because over the years she’s worked with Olivier, Gielgud and a dozen more.

“I keep trying to get over it,” she said in Los Angeles the other afternoon, “because it’s so dumb. Particularly as I loathe fans, people who line up to gape at stars. But there it is. That’s the way I am.”

Mirren spent four months in Belize working with Harrison Ford and director Peter Weir on the movie version of Paul Theroux’s novel, “Mosquito Coast”--the story of a man who turns his back on the American way of life and tries to construct a paradise for himself and his family in the South American jungle.

It was not a particularly rough location, according to Mirren, the main problem being that, after filming, there was nothing to do.

“It’s a desperately poor country,” she said, “a place right out of a Graham Greene or Somerset Maugham story--decaying, tropical, miserable and poor. But I had a nice apartment there and one of the few swimming pools in the country. And a 24-hour guard on the gate. If you read the book you can’t imagine there being anywhere in the world like the setting Theroux describes. Yet the moment you arrive in Belize there it is.”

In the story Mirren is the mother of four children, and she got along splendidly with them off the set. “I love children,” she said enthusiastically, “probably because I’ve never had any.”

(Mirren, 40, has never married.)

At first, she says, she had a vision of her character in the story as being “rather beautiful and floating through the jungle.” She mentioned this to Weir but got nowhere it seems. “In the end I wore no makeup at all and any time I turned up with my hair done Peter got very cross.”

She found the whole experience stimulating and of course soon got over her awe of Ford who is an affable fellow. But enough is enough. When it was finished and she was offered another movie to be made “somewhere up the Amazon” she shed few tears when financing for that one fell through. “By then I’d had enough of the jungle,” she said.

Mirren, a longtime star of the Royal Shakespeare Company has made such British films as “O Lucky Man,” “The Long Good Friday” and the just-opened “The Gospel According to Vic” (See review on Page 5.), made her American debut in MGM’s “2010” as a Russian.

“Ever since I was a small child I’ve had such a yearning to spend time in America,” she said. “California had always seemed magical to me and I loved working at MGM. I loved the huge sound stages. I loved just driving on the lot each day. And everyone was so nice to me. In Britain actresses tend to be thought of as footballs, to be used to score goals. Here we’re treated with such care, like time bombs in crystal vases.”

Mirren, who once described herself as “extremely sensual” and who modeled underwear in the London Sunday Times “as a way of kicking over the traces,” has been linked over the years with a string of suitors, none of whom, she claims, she ever wanted to marry.

And although her name has recently been linked with that of Taylor Hackford, who directed her in “White Nights,” she still has no intention of marrying, it seems.

What she is going to do, she says, is return to London in a couple of months to appear in a new play.

“I love it here,” she said, “but it’s the variety of work available in Britain that appeals to me, the fact that it’s so easy to switch from theater to television to film. And I’m getting twitchy to be on stage again. That’s my training, after all. I even miss the smell of backstage. . . .”