Helen Mirren actors to achieve the “Triple Crown of Acting”, joining the ranks of legends including Ingrid Bergman‚ Dame Maggie Smith, and Al Pacino. In 1998, Mirren played Cleopatra to Alan Rickman's Antony in "Antony and Cleopatra" at the National Theatre. The production received poor reviews; "The Guardian" called it "plodding spectacle rarely informed by powerful passion", while "The Daily Telegraph" said "the crucial sexual chemistry on which any great production ultimately depends is fatally absent". In 2000 Nicholas Hytner, who had worked with Mirren on the film version of "The Madness of King George", cast her as Lady Torrance in his
Helen Mirren name to Mirren in the 1950s and changed his name to Basil Mirren. He played the viola with the London Philharmonic before World War II and later drove a taxi cab and was a driving-test examiner, before becoming a civil servant with the Ministry of Transport. Mirren's mother was a working-class Londoner from West Ham, East London, the 13th of 14 children born to a butcher whose own father had been the butcher to Queen Victoria. Mirren considers her upbringing to have been "very anti-monarchist". Mirren was the second of three children; she was born three years after her older