Mirren was born Helen Lydia Mironoff in 1945 at Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital in Hammersmith, London, the daughter of Kathleen "Kitty" Alexandrina Eva Matilda (; 1909–1996) and Vasily Petrovich Mironoff (1913–1980), member of an exiled Russian nobility. Kathleen was a working-class Englishwoman from West Ham, East London, the 13th of 14 children born to a butcher whose own father had been the butcher to Queen Victoria. Vasily was Russian, taken to Britain at the age of two by his father, Pyotr Vasilievich Mironov. Pyotr, who owned a family estate near Gzhatsk (now Gagarin, Smolensk Oblast), was a member of the Russian aristocracy. His mother was Countess Lydia Andreevna Kamenskaya, aristocrat and a descendant of Count Mikhail Fedotovich Kamensky, a prominent Russian general in the Napoleonic Wars. He served as a colonel in the Imperial Russian Army and fought in the 1904 Russo-Japanese War. Pyotr later became a diplomat and was negotiating an arms deal in Britain when he and his family were stranded by the Russian Revolution in 1917. The former diplomat settled down in England, and became a London cab driver to support his family.