What a night for a coronation

by BAZ BAMIGBOYE

Last updated at 10:33 23 February 2007


Helen Mirren will be the third actress to win an Academy Award for portraying a monarch when (there's surely no if) she walks onto the stage of the Kodak Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard on Sunday night to accept her Oscar for her mesmerising portrait of our Queen.

It's going to be a great night for a coronation. Judi Dench won an Oscar for her Elizabeth I in Shakespeare In Love nine years ago, and Katharine Hepburn for Eleanor of Aquitaine in the 1968 film The Lion In Winter.

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"I'm just going to enjoy the night," Helen told me this week. "The period between getting the nomination and the day itself is the most exciting because you're neither a winner nor a loser — you're just a nominee, one of five, and then you sit there in a beautiful gown and they either call out your name or they don't."

I asked her if she still felt possessed by Elizabeth Windsor. She shook her head and quietly explained: "I let go of her when I finished the movie. It's the rest of the world that hasn't let go of her.

"I'm incredibly proud of the work I did. I used to think that if I was knocked over by a bus, the next day's papers would say: "Jane Tennison dies!" Now I think it would be: "Helen Mirren, who played the Queen, died."

"I'll be identified with that role for a while until, hopefully, I do something else as good."

After the Oscars, Helen returns to Shepperton Studios to complete her work on Iain Softley's movie Inkheart and then she'll take a break. "I want - and I need - one," she sighed.

Later, she intends to finish some writing for a book of photographs exploring her family background. And then she'll return to acting. She'd love to do a play, she adds, because she's "longing to get back to the theatre".

When I saw The Queen last August, I knew (and I wrote this!) that it would lead Helen - and the film - all the way to the Oscars. In my mind, she won it seven months ago.

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