Helen Mirren: The naked Dame

Theatrical dames don't usually do smouldering sexuality. But the one-time convent girl from Southend has always trodden her own path. Best known for 'Prime Suspect', her latest screen role sees her as a stalwart of the Yorkshire WI - and yes, at 57, she will be taking her clothes off

It is self-evident that a damehood is not bestowed until the recipient has been around a while. The honour is not even worth thinking about until you are at least 50. For actresses, this presents a problem. Because as any actress will tell you, the middle years are the most career-threatening. Younger looks are required. The roles aren't there any more.

It's not that those relatively few actresses who do flourish in later life necessarily lack sex appeal. But from Margaret Rutherford, Peggy Ashcroft and Wendy Hiller, to Joan Plowright, Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, the great theatrical dames of the last half-century have, even in their youth, tended not to be out-and-out sex symbols. The very term "theatrical dame," with its connotations of undignified attempts to hold back the years, is an unfortunate one.

With the elevation to damehood in the Queen's Birthday Honours of Helen Mirren, however, the mould has definitely been broken. Smouldering sexuality has been Mirren's trademark ever since, as a convent-educated 18-year-old, she was spotted by the Royal Shakespeare Company and dubbed the "sex queen of Stratford".

Mirren, it seems, has never stopped taking her clothes off in front of audiences. She did so in her first film, Age of Consent (1969), opposite James Mason. She was equally revealing in the much derided 1979 film Caligula, and again in 1989 in Peter Greenaway's film The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. She marked her 50th birthday in 1996 by appearing naked on the cover of Radio Times, and she's still at it, at the age of 57, in the forthcoming film Calendar Girls, based on the true story of the fundraising, stripping members of a Yorkshire branch of the Women's Institute.

But it is Mirren's greatness as an actress - rooted in the techniques she acquired on the classical stage in her twenties and thirties - for which she is respected by her fellow professionals. "There are not many sex symbols who can really act," says the actress Samantha Bond. "But Helen is definitely one of them." The playwright Alan Bennett - the film version of whose stage work The Madness of George III featured Mirren as the Queen - says she is "very good because she is an actress as well as a film star, and there are plenty of film stars of whom that can't be said". In the scenes in Madness that were about her relationship with the King (Nigel Hawthorne) she was, says Bennett, "very moving".

Three consecutive Baftas for the role for which Mirren is perhaps most famous - that of Jane Tennison, the troubled but brilliant detective in the TV series Prime Suspect - also speak of the serious esteem in which she is held by her peers. The distinguished critic John Lahr, author of the critical study Show and Tell, calls Mirren a "wonderful actress", citing her Prime Suspect role as the one which brings together all her most important qualities. "To be the kind of actress she is, she has had to fight a lot of battles," he says. "And in Prime Suspect she has to be smart and ballsy and resourceful. The character is isolated by her intelligence, by her commitment to doing the job well. It's great that Mirren has had a part that allows her to bring all these things out of herself. She's full of passion, but she makes the passion articulate." Lahr believes that Mirren's very presence in a film or play means that "it's got to have something".

Not that she has escaped critical censure, and some of her career decisions - notably that infamous Caligula, produced by Penthouse owner Bob Guccione - have been shaky. The quality of other work she has appeared in might be kindly described as uneven, and some critics have questioned the way she achieves her effects. A 1998 National Theatre production of Antony and Cleopatra with Mirren and Alan Rickman in the title roles was a critical flop. But Mirren has never shown much sign of caring what the critics say, or of dwelling on past mistakes.

Independence of spirit is something that has marked out Mirren's life personally as well as professionally, although often, it seems, insecurity has had to be masked. Born Ilyena Lydia Mironoff to a Russian father and English mother, she was brought up in Southend, "feeling like an immigrant". At school, she has said, "I was always frightened of other people. Then when I started acting I worried that I wasn't doing it well enough. Later my anxiety was more in the social sense. It sounds a terrible thing for a strong feminist woman to say, but I've always needed a guy to hide behind who could be the strong person at a party."

For years, though, Mirren scorned marriage - "a personal preference, not a political statement". And she never wanted children. "I was never drawn to babies. The only dolls I played with as a child were grown-up dolls. My skin still crawls when I see a little girl hauling around a great big baby doll." Nonetheless, Mirren has a nephew to whom she has been very much a second mother.

The men in Mirren's life have included a Russian art dealer, Prince George Galitzine, and the actor Liam Neeson. But the man who is now her husband is the Hollywood director Taylor Hackford, whom she met when auditioning for his 1984 film White Nights. She moved in with him in Los Angeles and established a Hollywood career, but comes back to work in Britain and on the Continent. In November she returns again, to take on the demanding role of the murderous mother in O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra, his American reworking of the Greek Orestes-Electra legend.

She does not confine herself to acting. She has campaigned on behalf of Amnesty International and Oxfam, and in the run-up to the 1997 general election could be seen playing off her Prime Suspect role by accompanying Tony Blair around a Middlesbrough police station.

There was no sign that Hackford was to remain anything other than her lover when, to Mirren's friends' surprise, they married in 1997, with a wedding in the Scottish Highlands. "It was fantastic," Mirren has said. "It was so romantic: a feeling of being not owned but possessed, which I'd never had before."

These sentiments do not quite square with the Mirren that many people in film and theatre know. "She's a formidable lady, but very nice," Alan Bennett says. "She knows her own mind." Before his death Nigel Hawthorne spoke of the support Mirren gave him while they were working together on The Madness of King George. "I am a bit of a brooder and I'd start regretting things I'd done the day before, but she would tell me not to look back, to learn to let it go." Another leading actress recalls how Mirren, whom she had never met, wrote to her to congratulate her after seeing her on the stage.

Samantha Bond, herself a TV detective as well being noted for her role as Miss Moneypenny in the James Bond films, thinks that the great thing about Mirren's damehood is the signal it sends out to other actresses, indeed other women generally. "Helen doesn't appear to be frightened of ageing and taking her sexuality with her," Bond says. "And it kind of gives her female audience the right to say, well, I can do that. But it's never domineering sexuality, just totally effortless. She's shown that you still don't have to be butch and manly, but you can be all this and powerful and intelligent, too."