MIRREN IMAGES

As Dame Helen Mirren turns 80, MARION MCMULLEN reflects on some of the actress's biggest roles

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SHE has been a deadly gun-toting assassin, a top police detective, played queens and a gangster’s moll ... and famously stripped off for Calendar Girls.

But Dame Helen Mirren was born Ilyena Lydia Vasilievna Mironoff 80 years ago on July 26, 1945, to an English mother and Russian-born civil servant Vasiliy Petrovich Mironov. He changed the family name to Mirren by deed poll in 1951. “My poshed-over voice was learnt and assimilated,” Helen once said. “I was an Essex girl.”

She longed to be French as a teenager and read French literature and smoked French cigarettes. “From the age of 15, I desperately wanted to be Brigitte Bardot and to go and live in St Tropez, but I was just a small and plump English girl with spots.”

One of her first tastes of acting was playing Gretel in a school production of Hansel & Gretel in 1955. She went on to work at a fun fair in Southend and was training to be a teacher when she landed the part of Cleopatra in Antony And Cleopatra at the National Youth Theatre in 1966.

By the time she was 23, she was the youngest actress at the Royal Shakespeare Company, appearing in productions like Troilus And Cressida. She later learned how to play the lute for a production of Hamlet and would practise on the banks of the River Avon.

"I wanted to be a great Shakespearean actress," she said.