Dame Helen Mirren has won the award for Best Actress at this year’s Olivier Awards with MasterCard for her acclaimed performance as Elizabeth II in Stephen Daldry’s hit production of The Audience.
Mirren’s first ever Olivier Award, the prestigious accolade marks a special awards hat-trick for The Queen actress, who previously won an Academy Award and BAFTA for her role as the country’s much-loved monarch in The Audience playwright Peter Morgan’s blockbuster film.
Her highly acclaimed performance in The Audience – Morgan’s imagined insight into the secret meetings between Elizabeth II and Britain’s changing Prime Ministers during her 60 year reign – saw the actress star alongside fellow nominee Richard McCabe as 1960s Labour PM Harold Wilson.
In Charles Spencer’s five-star review for The Telegraph, the critic praised Mirren’s “magnificent performance”, while The Guardian’s Michael Billington wrote that Mirren “once again gives a faultless performance that transcends mere impersonation to endow the monarch with a sense of inner life and a quasi-Shakespearean aura of solitude”.
Mirren’s royal links can be traced back to the beginning of her acting career, where she started out at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1960s. Since then she has starred as three different Queens on screen, playing Elizabeth I in the television series of the same name and Queen Charlotte in Nicholas Hytner’s 1994 film The Madness Of George III. The only actress to play both Queen Elizabeths on screen, Mirren also boasts an extensive career on stage, having appeared most recently in Dance Of Death, Mourning Becomes Electra and Phèdre.
Speaking backstage, Mirren said “It’s more for the Queen than it is for me, I think,” before congratulating her fellow cast member Richard McCabe for his win earlier in the evening, saying: “I forgot to mention all those other wonderful actors and actresses [in her speech]. That was wonderful, really exciting. I wish Bob Crowley had one because we always want our fellow artists to win but we’re very happy.”
One of Britain’s best-loved actresses, Mirren fought off fierce competition from fellow nominees Kristin Scott Thomas (Old Times), Billie Piper (The Effect) and Hattie Morahan (A Doll’s House) to be crowned Queen of the stage at this year’s ceremony.