Mirren’s banner year

“Weird” things make Helen Mirren cry.

“Parades make me cry,” the actress says. “Little drum majorettes, little 5- or 6-year-old drum majorettes always make me cry -- something about the sweetness of it.”

And embarrassment drives her to tears. Just a few days before, she felt the tears coming when she was in Buckingham Palace waiting for Prince Charles to bestow the title of dame upon her.

“I felt myself going just as I was walking up,” the vivacious 58-year-old explains over breakfast. “It’s all very formal and very well organized. They rehearse you before you do it. Prince Charles was waiting there. The throne is behind him and the band is playing. Everyone’s families are sitting in the ballroom. It’s amazing and I thought, ‘Oh, my God, this is so embarrassing. Stop [crying] right now. Do not go there. Control it.’ I managed to stop myself.”

Mirren confesses she was surprised she enjoyed the ceremony so thoroughly. “First of all, they ask if you are in agreement [to be titled]. If you say no, obviously they don’t give you one and they don’t ask you again. But if you say yes, you wait and they just announce it in the press. From the moment you are announced you are a dame, but then you have a date to go to the palace. There were two other gentlemen being knighted [the same day]. They do all sorts of awards [during the ceremony] -- people from all walks of life for service to children, service to conservation. There were a hundred or more people who were also getting honors. I was dreading it, but then I really enjoyed it.”

Though Mirren lives in Los Angeles with her husband, director Taylor Hackford, whom she met while making his “White Nights” in 1985, the actress has been in London for the past few months appearing in repertory at the National Theatre in Eugene O’Neill’s “Mourning Becomes Elektra.” “It’s 4 1/2 hours long,” she explains with a smile. “I’m only in it for three hours, but that’s enough. It is a triumphant hit. This session we are going to the end of January.”

Mirren has always made sure during her near four-decade career for which she has won Emmys, Golden Globes and two Oscar nominations (“The Madness of King George,” “Gosford Park”) that she returns to the theater every three or four years “to maintain my own sense that I could do it. You do lose confidence in yourself very quickly as far as stage is concerned and just to kind of remind everyone in Britain that I can do it. That’s where I started.”

Because of her theatrical schedule, Mirren wasn’t able to be in Los Angeles this fall for the local premiere of her latest film, “Calendar Girls,” but she was here for the national opening Dec. 19. Already a smash hit in England -- it is one of the top 10 highest-grossing films ever made in the British Isles -- “Calendar Girls” is inspired by the true story of several women who are members of the Rylstone and District Women’s Institute service organization who decide to do a “nude” calendar to raise money for the local hospital. (The late husband of one of the women had been treated there for leukemia.) Mirren is nominated for a Golden Globe for best actress in a comedy or musical as the lively, opinionated Chris, the woman who comes up for the idea of the calendar after her best friend Annie’s (Julie Walters) husband dies.

The real women, Mirren says, “had a huge sense of humor” about the calendar. “I don’t think they particularly saw it as being brave. They saw it as a lark. The amazing thing about them is that they have been completely righteous and never lost, through all the razzmatazz, sight about why they did it in the first place.”

Ask the film’s director, Nigel Cole, about his casting of Mirren in the movie and he refuses to give a straight answer. “I tried everybody,” he deadpans. “But they all turned me down, so I had to go with Helen. I wanted to get Billy Bob Thornton to do it in drag, but at the last moment he bailed and I thought, ‘Who reminds me of Billy Bob Thornton?’ And I said, ‘Helen Mirren, of course!’ ”

On a more serious note, he adds that “Helen and Julie just popped into my head when I sat down and thought about casting.” Mirren, whom he describes as a national treasure, “has always impressed with the way she finds the vulnerability in any role she plays. I think she could bring that quality to Chris because there was a danger of her being slightly irritating because she is so full on all the time.”

Needed convincing

Mirren wasn’t so sure about the role, though -- at least not initially. “I remember the first meeting vividly,” Cole says. “She said, ‘I don’t know, Nigel.’ I said, ‘Well, what’s wrong with it?’ It was an early draft of the script and she said, ‘It’s so middle. Middle class. Middle England.’

“I had to convince her this wasn’t kind of a light comedy, there was some real drama for her to give it decency. She had done a couple of comedies and they hadn’t worked out and she thought she would stick to the dramatic stuff. I had to convince her this wasn’t just an opportunity for jokes about middle-age women taking their bras off.”

She finally realized the potential of “Calendar Girls” at the read-through with the rest of the cast. “It was so funny,” Mirren recalls. “I was laughing until the tears came and I thought, ‘This is going to be great.’ What I loved about the story is if it hadn’t been a true story, if it was just a mad invention of a screenwriter, it would have been completely meaningless, but the fact [is] that it happened and it happened for the reason it did.”

Mirren spent little time with Tricia Stewart, the woman on whom her character is based. “I never felt like I was having to do an impersonation,” she says. “I just took what was on the page of the script and went from there, but Trish is such a lot of what I do. The character as written was inspired by her. She is very funny and out there and strong, a very forceful personality.”

“I always liked her,” Stewart says of her screen alter ego. “I watched ‘Prime Suspect’ and ‘The Madness of King George’ but never imagined she would be portraying me in a movie. Helen was much like me.”

Mirren recalls the inspirational tea she had at the home of Angela -- the woman Annie is based on -- where she met several of the women. “They were in this tiny stone house around the kitchen table and were these amazing characters,” she says. “They were loud and laughing and joking. Yet if you drove down the road, you’d never know behind the door of this house was this kind of explosion just of character. To me, the lesson of the film, if there is any sort of lesson at all, is how extraordinary the ordinary can be.”

For Mirren fans, there is another reason to rejoice in the coming year. In the spring on PBS’ “Masterpiece Theatre,” Mirren will return as the tough-nosed British police inspector Jane Tennison in a new four-hour “Prime Suspect” thriller.

Mirren says she was a “bit grumpy” about returning to Tennison after a seven-year absence “I felt like I was going backwards,” she says. “I felt very uncomfortable about it. I had been a bit resistant of doing it at all but then I felt, you get the best writers who are available and you get the best director available. And it’s a great leading role.

‘The great thing about when I do ‘Prime Suspect’ is my voice is heard. I am very sort of central; I am like an executive producer. It’s a great position to be in, so why turn your nose up at that?”