Sure, Helen Mirren is an Oscar-winning, Shakespeare-trained, supremely talented and thoughtful woman whose legacy includes hundreds of stellar performances on TV, stage, and screen. She holds the title Dame for her services to the performing arts, but by performing the apparently miraculous achievement of looking hot in her bathing suit whilst in her sixties is destined to come up within seconds of mentioning her name.
A vacation snapshot of 63-year-old Helen on the beach with her husband surfaced in astounded articles and stunned Facebook posts the world over. Now, is this a good thing – or a truly stupid thing?
Is it positive for people to recognize that “older” women are capable of looking attractive? Of course. But should this be the lead in the public’s consciousness? Why is it that her erstwhile hotness (or any woman’s figure) is the most resonant, relevant thing?
“I think the thing that will haunt me for the rest of my life is that bloody photograph of myself in a bikini,” says Mirren. “In and of itself, it is a lie because I don’t actually look like that and I know that that is going to haunt me forever and I’ll be forever trying to bury it unsuccessfully.”
Perhaps my GCF (Girl Crush Forever) will be gratified to know that inspiring as her perennial loveliness and fuckability may be (and I admit, they certainly are), what’s even more inspirational to me are her intelligence, talent, straight-forwardness, unpretentiousness, and her Herculean ability to transcend her big bosom, even when others cannot. Critics are prone to laud her mammaries in reviews — “Mirren is stirringly voluptuous as the Harlowesque good-time girl”. It even peeks out when pointing out her more transcendental qualities, with one reviewer describing her as “bursting with grace.”’
Though the actress described herself as “being famous for being cool about not being gorgeous”, Dame Helen is an incredible beauty. In an infamous interview where our heroine conveys (charmingly) her disdain for the host’s reluctance to talk about anything other than her eroticism and/or tits — “Serious actresses can’t have big bosoms — is that what you mean?” — her skin fairly glows, and I almost want to jump her bones myself. Such is the potent cocktail of looks and intelligence, and Helen is a heady mixture.
Most recently, her master class on how to be a woman included her chastising director Sam Mendes’ lack of female inspiration during her speech at the Empire Movie Awards:
“I don’t want to unduly pick on Sam Mendes, but when he spoke about his inspirations earlier this evening, I’m afraid not a single one of the people he mentioned was a woman.
“Hopefully in five or ten years, when Sam’s successor is collecting their Inspiration Award, the list will be slightly more balanced in terms of its sexual make-up. In the meantime, this one is for the girls.”
Not long ago, pneumatic model Kelly Brook cited our Dame-in-every-way as an inspiration, saying, “The fact that Helen Mirren can look so great in swimwear is an amazing boost for all women.” We can argue whether or not extending society’s narrow and elusive standards of beauty up the age chain does women any favors. But what is for sure is that the most inspirational thing about Helen Mirren is not the way the star fills a bathing suit – it’s the way she fills her role as an Earthbound woman with incredible confidence, intelligence and grace.
I can thing of no better compliment than to say Dame Helen has shown herself to be the quintessential, the ultimate, dame.
Brava! (I found your blog through the link on your last Etsy article and reading this, I just had to give you a virtual round of applause.)
Helen Mirren is an incredibly, devastatingly attractive but it’s her total being that informs her body. She transcends the flesh, as a whole, balanced, graceful person, and therefore it follows that she makes herself attractive to anyone with any sensibility whatsoever. That’s not the problem. It’s how we as a culture and a society express it, and how we imply that there’s a fragile line between ‘attractive, viable person’ and ‘too old/unfuckable to be visible’. We stop at the body and yet, some ‘hot babes’ of any gender just don’t seem that interesting, and some with pudgy bellies or odd noses or wispy hair still make us want to hurl ourselves at them.
It’s her very ability to accept that she isn’t a mathematically perfect ‘beauty’ that makes her beautiful, yet we stop at her bikini body when describing her amazingness. What a shame.
That’s not even getting into how vile it is to reduce anyone’s worth to whether or not we find them ‘doable’ but that’s a whole other steaming pile.
Thanks for being a demonstratively grand dame yourself, Ms. Dixie. L-u-v.
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