“Helen doesn’t say, `Please love me. Look, I’ll smile nicely, and you’ll love me,” Stephen Frears tells John Lahr for a cannily written profile of Queen star Helen Mirren in last week’s issue of The New Yorker. “She’s not inviting you in the way other actresses often are. She just says, `This is what it’s like,’ and that’s what you love about her. She confronts something, and she doesn’t sentimentalize it.” Elizabeth I costar Jeremy Irons adds, “She goes for life…that’s why she’s alluring to men. She is the complete antithesis of the vapid.”
