The Russian connection

Marianne Gray talks to Helen Mirren about her latest film, for which she’s had an Oscar nomination

The first time I met Helen Mirren was at the Berlin Film Festival in 1985 when she was playing a Russian cosmonaut called Tanya Kirbuk in Peter Hyams’s space epic 2010. She laughed about having to learn Russian phonetically so she could say ‘roll the condensers’ and ‘send up the pod’ with an authentic Moscow accent.

‘Sadly, those who could have helped me with my accent, people like my grandmother and my Auntie Olga, have died off,’ she lamented, showing me her passport with her real name, Ilyena Mironov, daughter of Vasiliy Mironov and granddaughter of a tsarist colonel who was negotiating an arms deal with the British government when the Russian Revolution broke and who ended up stranded, along with his family, in Britain.

Twenty-five years later she is still playing Russians, but this time in English, as Count Leo Tolstoy’s impassioned wife Sofya in The Last Station — a tale of love and a battle for estate rights set in 1910 during Tolstoy’s grim last days, for which she has received a Best Actress nomination in this year’s Oscars. Christopher Plummer plays the 82-year-old author of War and Peace, Paul Giamatti the fiery Chertkov and James McAvoy the idealistic Valentin.

‘I’m very happy and honoured for Christopher, myself and our film,’ is Mirren’s response to news of the nomination. ‘I think Tolstoy himself would have been perplexed by all this, but Sofya his wife would have been over the moon. So, in that spirit, I am too.’

‘I felt such an affinity with Sofya,’ she says in her gravelly voice when we meet over lunch at the National Theatre. ‘Apart from being one of the great women’s roles in film, she and I share a Russian heritage.