The reluctant dame

In a recent newspaper column, TV presenter Anne Robinson bemoaned the fact that women in their late fifties 'can't all look like Helen Mirren', and proceeded to list the anatomical reasons why - she has saggy arms, Helen's are taut, she has fat hips, Helen doesn't, her face looks 'drawn', Mirren remains youthfully glam, and so on.

It's become part of the myth surrounding 58-year-old Mirren (or Dame Helen, as we must call her, following the Queen's birthday honours this summer) that all women are admiringly jealous of her looks and figure, and that all right-thinking men fancy the pants off her.

For this reason, her casting as Christine Mannon in the National Theatre's production of Eugene O'Neill's epic, Mourning Becomes Electra, is absolutely spot-on. Christine Mannon, after all, is not only the play's primary object of male desire - the adulterous lover of a dashing younger man (Paul McGann) who plots to poison her suffocating older husband - but is also the object of her daughter's intense sexual envy.

Remarkably, for a theatrical dame of the realm, Mirren has only performed at the National once before, with Alan Rickman in Anthony And Cleopatra five years ago. 'One performance here is not enough for me. I should definitely have done more in my life,' she agrees, a little baffled by the statistic. We're sitting in a dingy NT conference room, a copy of the play sitting thickly between us (based on Aeschylus's Oresteia, it will run for four-and-a-half hours, she confirms), and for the record, yes, Mirren is really very slim, indeed. Small-boned, fine-skinned, and firmish of bicep, hers is an unconventional beauty. She is neither voluptuous nor twinkly-pretty (like Dame Judi Dench, say), but fine-featured and rather noble in character. Her appearance as Queen Charlotte in The Madness Of King George in 1994 was another inspired piece of casting by the current director of the NT Nicholas Hytner, 'a friend and supporter', who insisted that she come back to the South Bank. Mourning Becomes Electra was picked especially for her. 'The great thing about the play,' she says forcefully, 'is that it's absolutely driven by women. The men have very good, complex roles, but the drama is absolutely driven by Christine and her daughter Lavinia.'

Professionally, Mirren has always been drawn to strong, sensual, intelligent-yet-vulnerable roles - or perhaps her own personality has thus informed them. The list is long, from her earliest days at the Royal Shakespeare Company and role-defining parts as Cressida and Lady Macbeth to her gritty-yet-silky gangster's moll in The Long Good Friday, and the character for whom she is still best known, Detective Superintendent Jane Tennison - seen last weekend in Prime Suspect VI smashing a few more glass ceilings on behalf of womankind. Last year, Mirren took her place in the A-Z of British acting talent that was the cast list of Gosford Park and, this summer, stripped 'nude' in Calendar Girls. Yet still, she says, gesturing to the brick-thick script on the table before us, she feels a flutter of 'the old insecurities' as she contemplates each new heavyweight project. For all her strength of character and her Emmys and Baftas, Mirren is not without self-doubt.

'It's a form of self-questioning,' she says. 'I've always felt it - a kind of insecurity that combines extreme arrogance with an incredible lack of self-confidence. I think it's common among actors, this horrible feeling that says, "Oh my God, I suck!" and at the same time, "I'm a genius, why don't they understand me?" On the rare occasion that I go to posh Hollywood parties I'm always a little star-struck. It's kind of, "Oh my God! I was just in the loo with Sandra Bullock, and she was really nice to me!"'

Has her elevation to Dame-hood, her official recognition by the British establishment (notwithstanding her well-documented old lefty-ism) not helped to quell those feelings? 'Oh my God, no,' she replies, horrified. 'I feel very ambivalent about it actually. I don't like seeing letters addressed to Dame Helen Mirren. It makes me feel peculiar. It doesn't feel like me.

I know these sound like famous last words, but I'll never use the title. I don't think I'll ever call up a posh restaurant and say, "It's Dame Helen Mirren here."' She pauses and thinks for a moment. 'Maybe when I'm very old.'

Recently, Mirren has spoken of her experience of 'date rape' as a young woman, of how, perhaps in common with a number of actresses of her generation, she felt as though men pursued her merely for sex, and of how 'alien' she found those men. She does not wish to elaborate further, yet the temptation is to surmise that Mirren's feminism has at least some root in the undeniably chauvinistic film sets of the Sixties and Seventies.

She thinks that her 'Russian side' may have something to do with those old insecurities. She was born, glamorously, Ilynea Lydia Mironoff, the granddaughter of a Russian aristocrat who came to England when her father was two, not as a refugee of the Revolution but to do an arms deal, she has said. Nowadays, she bases herself in London, but spends a great deal of time in Los Angeles with her movie director husband Taylor Hackford, who she met during the filming of White Nights 18 years ago. In London she leads a relatively quiet life, she insists. 'I kind of do feel slightly amazed that I'm sitting here, playing a big part at the National Theatre and being called Dame Helen,' she says reflectively. 'It feels like a parallel universe.'