Review of Helen Mirren's In the Frame

In The Frame by Helen Mirren

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


[N.B. I am posting a few reviews that I wrote back in 2008 for my blog. I wrote them contemporaneously with finishing the books, long before Goodreads. I thought they might be of some use here so I am reposting with slight edits to fit the Goodreads format].

I have written about Mirren and my general admiration for her before. After I saw the movie "The Queen," I was in one my periodic bloggish raptures. (http://lasthouse.blogspot.com/2006/12...),

It is interesting to hear from her directly and unmediated in this book. (It feels like she actually wrote this herself and that it was not ghostwritten). The book is not a tell-all, thank goodness. It is an older woman's loving look back at the places and people she remembers - an older woman who has had a remarkable career, obviously. Her manners are too good to bash people or to trumpet herself. What interested me particularly were her Russian origins. Her grandfather was a Russian aristocrat stranded in England by the Russian revolution. There are some striking pictures of her Russian ancestors in the first few pages. She had the most beautiful great aunts...

Also of interest, and a bit of a surprise, was that she was her English hippy phase. I got to know about Mirren only in the 90s with Prime Suspect. I knew, vaguely, that she had been a famous stage actress and had some history as a sex bomb in the sixties but I had no details. It turns out that once upon a time she actually travelled around North Africa with a crew of actors who performed for the locals some kind of experimental dumb-show theater. Even when I was 19 this would have sounded like a complete horror to me. Artsy fartsys from France and England and Japan torturing tiny, bewildered audiences, sleeping in tents, jouncing over bumpy desert roads. Mirren hints that this was not all such a great experience but is also clear it had its rewards. She had a lot of boyfriends; she took off her clothes (there are some topless shots here). Who knew? I think of her as The Queen or Jane Tennison but she had a life those characters would not hint at.

I also found myself wondering, noting her obvious restraint about her own success, what her peers would say about her as she was way back then. I expect the hippies she remembers so fondly would have been jealous of her. I also expect they would have been impressed, maybe even put off by, her ambition. She could not have got where she is without a lot of that.

She writes a little soupily but with feeling at the end of the book about her extended family. She married Taylor Hackford, an American producer, rather late in life. She never wanted marriage and a family as a young woman but she has one now - albeit of the stepson and niece and nephew variety. It seems that they mean a great deal to her.




View all my reviews