In a sovereign state

MOST actresses when they hit 40 fade from the screen. Hollywood considers them too old to even star opposite men in their 50s and 60s, and too wrinkled to have interesting inner lives of their own. They turn into ephemeral specters, flitting through the occasional art film, or donning the interesting character part. Remember Jessica Lange? Michelle Pfeiffer? Even ... Meg Ryan?

Dame Helen Mirren is not one of those actresses.

It is the morning after the Emmy Awards, and the 61-year-old Mirren is still giddy from last night’s victory for her portrayal as the volatile Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I, in an HBO miniseries. It is days before she storms the Venice Film Festival and wins another award for her portrayal of the current monarch Elizabeth II in the film “The Queen,” which opens Friday. In her off time from inhabiting the two iconic Elizabeths, Mirren also made the seventh installment of her iconic TV series, “Prime Suspect,” resuming the character that first made her famous on these shores at the ripe old age of 43: Jane Tennison, perhaps the coolest, fiercest female police detective to hit prime time, one without a stereotypically feminine -- i.e., nurturing -- bone in her body. Her intelligence is her greatest cudgel.

Asked why her career has seemed to improve with time, Mirren merely states the fact baldly. “I guess just because I’m still standing,” she says. “I think if you’re left still standing, it gets easier in a way. There is less of you around.”

That’s the demure answer, the factual answer, but there’s also a question of grit. “Toughness is my business,” says Mirren, “and the reality is that a lot of people really don’t or can’t make a living acting.”

Toughness is a motif that runs through many of Mirren’s characters, although this afternoon on the verandah of the Four Seasons, where she’s stopped between photo sessions, she’s hardly dressed the part. Instead, she is decked out in a flirty black and white sundress, with a salmon-colored sweater and salmon high heels. Her sleek blond hair nips below her ears.

Mirren isn’t conventionally pretty. Her eyes are too small, her nose rather too long and prominent, the whole bottom half of her face is too confident and forthright to suggest the passivity that often accompanies great beauty. But her smile, which isn’t often seen in some of her greatest parts, can be sly and dazzling. For years, male interviewers seemed to fixate on her sex appeal, which hasn’t dissipated with time.

Mirren didn’t attend the Emmy ceremony anticipating victory. “I was hoping, but you can’t ‘expect’ it. That’s a road to disappointment. I’ve lost enough times. I’ve done my ‘I’m so pleased that someone else has won’ face so often.” She riffs on the excruciating practice of smiling for the cameras when you’ve lost so publicly. “ ‘Of course she should have won. I’m just a worm by comparison!’ ” She laughs heartily. “I’m very good at that face.”

There’s a good chance that Mirren, who’s been nominated twice for an Oscar, won’t have to do that face much this season. In “The Queen,” she successfully humanizes a character who is at once completely public and still completely unknown.

“The queen is very formidable,” says director Stephen Frears. People “always talk about being tongue-tied in the presence of the queen. You’re asking someone to embody a person with that amount of power. When I met Helen, I believed that -- that this woman could be that powerful.”

Still, she insists she hesitated before accepting the part. “I go, ‘Oh well, no, no, I can’t do that.’ Just because it’s such a hot potato. In England, the media has such an obsession with the monarchy, so it is dangerous. Every living person in Britain has basically spent their whole life with the queen.”

Growing up in Essex, Mirren was the daughter of a socialist taxi driver (and the granddaughter of a White Russian stranded in Britain during the Russian Revolution). The family was strictly “anti-monarchist” and “republican.” “When I was growing up, my mum would say, ‘You know, even the queen has to go to the lavatory!’ It was a ‘The queen is just a human being like the rest of us’ kind of attitude.”

While Mirren now seems more admiring of the queen than her lineage might suggest, her ability to animate Elizabeth II is what carries the film.

“The Queen” chronicles the strange days after the shocking death of Princess Diana in 1997 and the prickly relationship between Elizabeth and the newly elected prime minister, Tony Blair, as he tries to coax the reticent and proud monarch away from holing up in Balmoral, refusing to acknowledge the people’s grief and hence committing PR hara-kiri. The film shows Elizabeth at her most removed from ordinary life, and her most vulnerable.

*

Doing the research

MIRREN met the queen, now 80, briefly at a massive ceremony when she was made a dame in 2003. Mostly, though, she relied on research, and what proved most useful were accounts of Elizabeth before she ascended the throne, “because I thought that was where you could see her genuine what-she-is-inside massive mantle of monarchy.”

She particularly liked a rather sycophantic account of her childhood, written by her former nanny, because it painted what it was like moving out of a large family home into Buckingham Palace when her father unexpectedly became king, after Edward VIII abdicated. “Suddenly they were in this palace with these enormous great corridors, and this real sense of displacement and not liking it.”

It’s a motif in the film that Elizabeth’s father never wanted to be king, and that the stresses of the job essentially killed him.

“I think Elizabeth was made of stronger stuff,” says Mirren. “I think she accepted it fully and said this is what I am, and didn’t fight against it. She did it as best she possibly could, and that’s what you see of her as a young girl, she is always trying to do the right thing, and trying to do it as best she can. There’s the very sweet kind of good girl trying to do what she knows she’s supposed to do.”

Mirren freely admits that “I’m just guessing,” about her character. Indeed, both her Elizabeths, the volatile red-haired sovereign and her stately, modern counterpart, are essentially acts of imagination because “It’s not easy to know either of them for the same reason, namely that so many of the sources about them are suspect.

“You’re looking through the smokes and mirrors of sycophancy or just gossipy-type criticism which is not at all valuable.”

Frears is noted for his keen, puckish feel for humanity’s foibles, particularly those of the British working class, and his insouciance gives “The Queen” a surprising lightness. He describes Mirren as an acting Ferrari -- “a method actress in that the thing is done on a very deep level. It’s not just a technical exercise.” Yet, says the director, she’s not self-aggrandizing about her labors. “She’s also British. You get on with it. She doesn’t glorify it.”

From a very early age Mirren wanted to act. As a child, she was “quiet interior, quiet, quiet, very quiet. I saw myself as shy, but in a sort of bold way. I wanted to be a bohemian. I always had that strength of wanting to be eccentric. Rather than the prom queen, I would have gone the Goth route.” At 19, she launched upon the public stage, creating a sensation with her first sensuous queen, Cleopatra, in a production for the National Youth Theater. Since then she’s played royalty both fictional and non, including Lady Macbeth, Titania and various Gertrudes, as well as the Oscar-nominated Charlotte in “The Madness of King George.”

Yet not all her characters were meant to rule. Her other academy nomination was for the emotionally stifled housekeeper in the Robert Altman murder mystery “Gosford Park.” At one point in the mid-’70s, she returned to her bohemian idealism and joined avant-gardist Peter Brook and his acting troupe and toured Africa and rural America for a year.

Although Mirren and her husband, the director Taylor Hackford, own a home in L.A., they’ve lived most of the time recently in their London home. Part of the reason is to accommodate Mirren’s ferocious work schedule, which also included a stint at the National Theatre in a four-hour version of Eugene O’Neill’s “Mourning Becomes Electra,” and the latest installment of “Prime Suspect,” which airs in November.

For all her self-assurance, Mirren maintains that spark of insecurity that keeps the greatest artists vulnerable.

“Whenever I go to the theater, I get incredibly intimidated by the actors on stage, and I forget that I am capable of doing it myself,” she admits.

“I actually do the same with movies. I watch movies and think, ‘God, they’re so brilliant! How do they do that?’ It’s like fantastic. Then when I get back into rehearsal on the set, I go, ‘Oh yes, I know how to do this, that’s right, I remember now....’ ”

*

rachel.abramowitz@latimes.com