Dame Helen Mirren

Harry Borden looks back on two shoots with the highlyregarded and multi-award-winning actor

- Harry Borden

The kind of portraits I’ve taken on celebrity shoots have been largely determined by the sort of job I’ve been doing. Even within the world  of editorial shoots, I might either be given a free hand to do whatever I like, or the brief might be quite specific. For that reason, some jobs are more enjoyable – and the results more satisfying – than others. In an ideal situation my aim is to get a definitive, interesting, ambiguous picture that has a chance of not being ephemeral, but sometimes the limits of a particular commission make that difficult to achieve.

I’ve photographed Helen Mirren twice and both times were quite different. The first time was in 1999, when I was asked to shoot portraits of her for a feature in the Sunday Times Culture magazine. At that time, Mirren was 54 and had already had a long and successful career in films, TV, and the theatre. In the 1990s she was perhaps most famous for playing DCI Jane Tennison in the longrunning TV drama Prime Suspect.

I met her at the stage door of the Cambridge Arts Theatre, where she was starring in a play. The commissioning editor had given me the freedom to choose how I wanted to photograph her. I was using my preferred camera-lens combination at that time, a Hasselblad 500CM with a standard 80mm lens, but I also took along a Polaroid 195 camera which I intended to use if time allowed.