Let’s all take a moment to appreciate everyone’s favorite dame, Helen Mirren. Mirren is riding the zeitgeist this week after a series of truly quotable interviews, begging the question: why did anyone ever stop talking about Helen Mirren in the first place?
The Royal Shakespeare Company-trained goddess and bona fide hottie recently announced her retirement from onscreen nudity. In an interview with Alan Cumming, the real-life inspiration behind the Saturday Night Live skit “Helen’s Magical Bosom” said, “That’s the good thing about getting older…You don’t have to do that sort of thing anymore. My pleasure pillows are purely for my husband now.” The 70-year-old icon is certainly revered for her rocking bod. Befitting her reputation for working in the buff, Mirren was named “Naturist of the Year” by British Naturism in 2004. Overjoyed by the honor, the Academy Award-winning actress exclaimed, “I do believe in naturism and am my happiest on a nude beach with people of all ages and races!”
Legendary helium voice aside, Mirren doesn’t need any props to make a badass point. Last month, the septuagenarian scene-stealer told The New York Daily News that she regrets not ordering people to “fuck off” more: “unfortunately, at least for my generation, growing up (we didn’t say [fuck off]) and I love the fact that girls are so much more confident and outspoken than my generation were…you’ve got to have the courage to stand up for yourself.” This is less of a one-off, and more of a crusade for Mirren, who told The Daily Mail in 2013 that “it’s quite valuable to have the courage and the confidence to say, ‘No, fuck off, leave me alone, thank you very much.’”
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Earlier this month, the woman T-Pain described as “underrated in bangability” went off on obnoxious bros who claim “ownership” over their partners, complaining, “It annoys me when I see men with their arm slung around their girlfriend’s shoulder…when I see girls being leaned on, I want to say, ‘Tell him to get his damned arm off your shoulder.’”
In fact, Mirren has unleashed a whole host of Pinterest-worthy quotes. On her nomadic lifestyle: “I still have a Gypsy sense of adventure. I don’t think I have slept in the same bed for more than three or four months my whole life. I am always planting vegetables that I never get to eat and flowers that I never see flower. I have always moved around the world.” On beauty: “There are physically beautiful people in the world (David Beckham, for instance, is unbelievably beautiful), then there are other people that are not beautiful, but are very attractive because of their personality, energy, brilliance, genius: all kinds of things. So I have a resistance to the word ‘beautiful.’” And on her sex life, which apparently “just gets better with age.”
When she’s not busy being the wisdom-spouting eccentric mum we all never had (but totally deserve), Mirren can be spotted casually riding the subway, or comparing Donald Trump’s hair to the “disgusting color” of an Aperol Spritzer. The EGOT-contender has skills we could never even dream of: she twerks like this, takes down Hollywood’s double-standards like this, and does it all while looking like this in an itsy bitsy red bikini. Oh, and according to Blake Lively, she’s the #SexiestWomanAlive.
While Helen Mirren is absolutely nothing like us, she’s sweet enough to trick us into believing that she is. After all, we can all relate to having a crush on Vin Diesel (“I love you, Vin”), or nostalgically reminiscing about the Oscars night when Leonardo DiCaprio chivalrously kissed us on the hand (OK, maybe that one is more adorable than relatable).
Still, the fact that the star of The Queen, Prime Suspect, and The Last Station is a card-carrying feminist with a dirty mouth and a great sense of humor is pretty fucking cool. And while we’ll miss seeing Mirren in the buff, we’ll always have Internet GIFs to remind us that this performance powerhouse is also a total babe.
