It's hard to believe Helen Mirren hasn't been nominated for an Oscar since The Last Station, way back in 2009. The shock comes not from her fate's unfairness, mind you. Instead, it stems from how Mirren seems to be actively chasing gold, nabbing essential precursor support for projects like Hitchcock, The Hundred-Foot Journey, Woman in Gold, Trumbo, and The Leisure Seeker. This year, the actress may be going down the same road with Golda, the recently released biopic about Golda Meier, "the Iron Lady of Israel.". To mark the occasion, let's look away from the failed Oscar buzz and consider the peak of Helen Mirren's work as a big-screen legend.
As with Angela Bassett, Gwyneth Paltrow, Sigourney Weaver, Marilyn Monroe, and Maggie Smith, TV performances will be set aside for another day, and so will her Academy-anointed turns. Caveats out of the way, this is my Mirren top ten…
AGE OF CONSENT (1969) Michael Powell
At the end of his career, celebrated director Michael Powell left Britain to work in Australia. Age of Consent, considered by many to be the auteur's last proper feature, was his second down under misadventure. The drama is a simple, sometimes dubious, affair as it portrays the dynamic between a middle-aged painter and his newfound muse on the postcard-pretty Dunk Island. While James Mason brings a screen veteran's gravitas to the artist's role, Helen Mirren makes the model part into her very own 'a star is born' moment.
She's a jolt of electricity, erotic and otherwise, doing everything in her power to sell the character's rebellious sensuality along with the current of interior conflict running beneath her beauty. As the picture precipitates into a troublesome ending, the 22-year-old thespian resolves the model's textual arc better than the script and even outperforms the master Mason. In some ways, Mirren's impetuous energy reconfigures the film as a duet more than a solo, elevating herself above mere aesthetic object for the camera's pleasure and her leading man's dilemma.
Age of Consent is available to rent and purchase on Apple TV, Amazon Video, Google Play, VUDU, DirecTV, and the Microsoft Store.
THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY (1980) John Mackenzie
Between Christic imagery and gangster movie antics, The Long Good Friday reveals itself to be a thorny exercise full of unexpected complexity. This manifests at the structure and storytelling level but is also evident within the characterizations that drive its plot. Paired with Bob Hoskins's first big screen star turn as a London mob boss, Mirren is on fire, a beguiling presence with a calculating stare and pragmatic spirit. Even when she's just observing from the sidelines, there's a spark of scheme-making in her look, a sense of power exuding from a glamorous façade.
The most surprising feat might be how perfectly the actress and her character fit within the lawless cosmos depicted. Though posh origins characterize the role, Mirren is so unforced in her presentation that one can't help but accept the central relationship and how major the mob moll is to the underworld power system. Rather than coming off as a supporting player stuck in a thankless girlfriend role, Mirren carries herself as the center of her own movie. It's happening parallel with this main narrative and is just as riveting.
The Long Good Friday is streaming on Max and the Criterion Channel.
EXCALIBUR (1981) John Boorman
Who else but Helen Mirren could re-imagine King Arthur's sorceress sister as a vicious vamp with such a voracious appetite? Bedecked in fabulous costumes and made up to be temptation personified, Morgan le Fay is a primordial force of evil played with an appropriate lack of subtlety. That's no dig at the actress' work, rather an appreciation of how well she understands the mythic milieu of the piece, how much fun she has savoring le Fay's poisonous words, her slinky devilishness. Tuning into a fever pitch, Mirren is a heightened marvel which, in another world, might have earned her a first well-deserved Oscar nomination.
Consider Mirren's royal rumble in Tinto Brass' Caligula for a similarly fearless discombobulation of vamp deviousness. There, too, the actress understands the assignment better than anyone else sharing the scene, swinging for the fences, past eroticism into outright grotesquerie.
Excalibur is available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Amazon Video, Google Play, Youtube, VUDU, Redbox, DirecTV, the Microsoft Store, and Spectrum On Demand.
CAL (1984) Pat O'Connor
To this day, Helen Mirren is one of only four women to have won the Cannes Best Actress prize twice. Her first victory came in 1984 when she played an Irish widow mourning her husband's murder at the hands of the IRA. Unbeknownst to her, the bereaved librarian starts an affair with a younger man involved in the crime, confessing her ambivalence towards the tragedy, the depths of unhappiness that have long marked her life. Much less central than one might presume, the role demands immense restraint from Mirren, even as she must enact a blatant seduction and embody a sinkhole of guilt for the titular character.
Recalling her final scene, one is amazed by how much emotional contradiction the actress can suggest, never letting herself spill into overt demonstrativeness. Her second Cannes victory would come in 1995 when she won the prize for her Oscar-nominated take on Queen Charlotte in The Madness of King George. It's a much less exciting performance when compared to Cal, but it's still a testament to how great Mirren is at suggesting passion and ardor. Along with a propensity for sexual adventure, that talent characterizes much of Mirren's early career before she became enshrined in gold-gilded prestige.
Cal is available to rent and purchase on Apple TV, Amazon Video, and the Microsoft Store.
WHITE NIGHTS (1985) Taylor Hackford
Many great actors resolve the challenge of compartmentalizing personalities and on-screen double-agenting by playing up the effort to keep up the ruse, the struggle that comes with concealing part of yourself. On the other hand, Helen Mirren excels by making her characters masters of duplicity. One good example would be the Russian-descendent actress' take on a Soviet dancer in White Nights, her allegiance to the nation in conflict with her attachment to an ex-lover who defected long ago. Only once, when watching Mikhail Baryshnikov dance a vivisection of his feelings, does she crack and let it all spill forth, melodrama with an erotic twist. Beyond that scene, Mirren keeps her cards close to the chest, suggesting just enough to provoke the audience's interest, mayhap trust, in her Galina Ivanova.
If I included Oscar-nominated works in this list, Mirren's Supporting Actress bid for Gosford Park would be here for reasons similar to White Nights. Also there, the actress subsumes the character's interiority until one surgically precise break point. Sadly, though the Cold War drama shares these qualities with Altman's whodunnit, the thespian received no plaudits for her work.
White Nights is available to rent and buy on Apple TV, Amazon Video, Google Play, Youtube, VUDU, DirecTV, the Microsoft Store, and Spectrum On Demand.
THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE AND HER LOVER (1989) Peter Greenaway
Perverse cinema was nothing new to Helen Mirren by the time she played the titular wife in this, the most famous of Peter Greenaway's Baroque films. However, the extremes of stylization and shock value contained within go further than her collaborations with such merchants of outrage like Lindsay Anderson and Ken Russell. Once more, she's a mobster moll, though one whose loyalty to her husband has eroded when we find her glamorously morose in Gaultier gowns and a lipstick-red grimace. To the sounds of Michael Nyman, she performs the mannered clockwork of this fashion show, keeping enough ugly humanity within herself so that her vengeance can taste bloody, visceral, hideously triumphant, or maybe just hideous.
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover is currently unavailable for streaming in the US. However, you can find physical media editions of the movie on DVD and Blu-Ray.
THE COMFORT OF STRANGERS (1990) Paul Schrader
From Gaultier to Armani, from one auteur's perverse visions to another's obscene imaginings, Mirren followed her mariticide avenger with her take on masochism gone astray, mad, malicious. Covered in silks and scars, she's the most enigmatic figure in this deliberately cryptic narrative of obsession in palatial Venice, playing second fiddle to a raconteur Christopher Walken, as both his greatest victim and closest companion. Indeed, there's an almost Janus-like duality to their coexistence, each another side of the same coin as they lust over Rupert Everett, coveting curdling into the need to destroy.
Still, as often happens, Mirren manages to outshine her co-star, synthesizing the text's willful contradictions and her director's epicurean chastity. The actress has hardly looked more beautiful than she does here, shot by Dante Spinotti like another great work of art contained within the historical locations. Like those masterpieces, she keeps her distance, untouchable even as she reaches to touch others. Yet, it's the conflicted hunger Mirren plays that most correlates to the spectator's experience. In some unsettling ways, she's our mirror, distorted but truthful.
The Comfort of Strangers is streaming on the Criterion Channel.
CALENDAR GIRLS (2003) Nigel Cole
Between its real-life feel-good bit of inspirational storytelling and a Best Actress Golden Globe nomination, Calendar Girls appears to be the prototypical Mirren 21st-century vehicle. That said, while it meets many expectations, there's a whiff of difference to put it above many similar and more mediocre movies. Part of it predicates precisely how the filmmakers decide to dramatize Mirren's character, foregrounding her ambition with as much zealousness as they picture her quirkiness and compassion. Tonally, this gives Calendar Girls some needed bite. For the actress' work, it provides a juicy meal to sink her teeth into.
As concretized by Mirren, Chris is the force propelling the plot with her idea of a nude calendar featuring middle-aged women for a local fundraiser. She's zany and wins many a laugh from the viewer. However, as the story stretches from its provincial sensibilities into something glitzier, the intentions underlying Chris' actions reveal themselves uglier than one might suppose. Instead of a saint cum clown, she's a three-dimensional person full of rough edges the actress sharpens instead of smoothing. By the time she's arguing with Julie Walters on a deserted backlot, Mirren has more than earned the audience's applause.
Calendar Girls is available to rent and buy on Apple TV, Amazon Video, Google Play, Youtube, VUDU, DirecTV, the Microsoft Store, and Spectrum On Demand.
THE CLEARING (2004) Pieter Jan Brugge
Lean and mean, perchance simple to a fault, The Clearing finds Helen Mirren employing her full arsenal of actorly tricks and talents. In flashback form, she evokes passion and sensuality, sketching the peaks of her relationship with her on-screen husband Robert Redford. Her penchant for finding the complexities in grief comes into play when he goes missing, as does the actress' ability to portray people prone to compartmentalization. Then, there's the perfect ambivalence in confronting her spouse's mistress, the scream queen anguish during the nighttime climax.
Though unheralded for such efforts, Mirren often finds greatness in negligible genre fare. She does it with more regularity than the equivalent for prestige pictures. In fact, The Clearing looks back and forth at a transitional point in the actress' career. It inherits much of the sorrow in Cal and the later stoicism of The Queen, existing right before she steamrolled through the 2006/7 awards season and gained new status. If only her path in the years since had featured more The Clearings and fewer unsuccessful attempts at recapturing her Oscar-winning buzz.
The Clearing is available to rent and purchase on Apple TV, Amazon Video, Google Play, YouTube, VUDU, DirecTV, and the Microsoft Store.
EYE IN THE SKY (2015) Gavin Hood
The 2010s were a sad period for Helen Mirren fans. Or maybe you're the rare Woman in Gold stan and spent the decade celebrating the actress' surge as the queen of failed Oscar buzz. "De gustibus non est disputandum" and all that. However, even those who despaired over Trumbo and Hitchcock could find the odd project to appreciate, those famous exceptions that prove the rule. Gavin Hood's Eye in the Sky is the most evident example, prodding the moral quandaries of the war on terror in the form of a chamber cross-edited to maximum suspense. At the center of the storm, Mirren stands out as Col. Katherine Powell, commanding officer in a covert mission to capture members of an Islamic militant group.
Battle-hardened to the point she's little more than her narrative and military function, the character is stuck in a limited range of reaction. Within those parameters, the actress flourishes, delineating a methodological mindset that can quickly derail into inhumanity without malice. Her conviction is ferocious, so devoid of emotion that she becomes a terrifying symbol of drone warfare in the modern world, amorality backed up by a skewed ethics perspective. It's the diametrical opposite register to the one she exercises for Collateral Beauty, a much worse mid-10s movie where the actress shines despite it all. If you're not in the mood for a martial procedural, try that preposterous star-studded drama for some Mirren excellence.
Eye in the Sky is streaming on Amazon Prime Video and Kanopy. You can also rent and buy it on most of the major platforms.
What are your favorite Helen Mirren performances on the big screen?