Bohemian Dame

A round of back-to-back interviews may have left lesser actresses feeling weary, but Dame Helen Mirren is still on a high from what she describes as the best year of her career.

She's an hour-and-a-half late for the interview, but I can't be too cross because she's chatty, open and isn't fazed by questions on relationships, nudity and her bohemian youth.

Winning Best Actress Oscar for The Queen, an Emmy for her portrayal of DCI Jane Tennison in the last Prime Suspect and another for her TV role as Elizabeth I, there's no wonder she's smiling.

"This feels like the peak for me. I can't imagine I will ever have as good a year again, but I did feel, long before I did The Queen or the last Prime Suspect, that when I was doing Elizabeth I, this was the greatest role I'd ever had.

"Then the year of work went on and on. You never expect awards. So when that year of awards started rolling out, it was pretty incredible. Of course, there will never be a year like that again."

Today, Helen, 62, is here to discuss her photograph-filled autobiography, In The Frame, featuring snapshots of her life, from her Russian ancestors to her childhood in Southend-on-Sea, her theatrical glories and her family, film director husband Taylor Hackford and her two stepchildren.

They've been married for ten years but together for more than 20, and divide their time between homes in Los Angeles and London.

They met in the early Eighties on the set of White Nights. Helen and Taylor were both in their late 30s and it wasn't love at first sight, she recalls, partly because she had never had a relationship with a director and felt it was off limits.

'Also, more importantly, Taylor was married, with two children from two different marriages. But as soon as the film started our attraction to each other became a clear and unavoidable force."

She had had many boyfriends, including a four-year relationship with actor Liam Neeson, eight years her junior. But with Taylor, for the first time she didn't put her career above her man. "It wasn't so much about Taylor being different, it was about my life being different," she says. "I was very lucky that Taylor happened to appear in my life at the moment when I was ready for it."

Still, she left him for six months to try to make some space between them, but he turned up in London having separated from his wife.

"Taylor's very strong, interesting with a forceful personality and I wasn't going to get away from him as easily as I had from other people. Also, his commitment to me was very big. He had to break up his family and he's a very loving father and has stayed all of his life very close to his family."

She moved in with him with his older son Rio, who was 15 at the time, while he had joint custody of his second son Alex, then six. "It was a whole new world for me, utterly alien. I had no experience with children and I had absolutely no profile in Hollywood as an actress. The people who ultimately got me through the anxiety and my feelings of awful displacement were Taylor's sons, Alex and Rio. My arrival in their world had caused upheaval and pain. Yet they gave me sympathy and courtesy from the beginning and I loved them."

Helen grew up in Southend-on-Sea, the daughter of a Russian immigrant father and East End mother. Her paternal grandfather was sent to England to make an arms deal with the British, but when the Bolshevik Revolution broke out he was left stranded and ended up as a London cabbie. Helen's father also became a taxi driver. Her mother was determined that Helen and her sister would get a decent education and grow up to be economically independent women.

Helen became interested in acting after her mother took her to an amateur production of Hamlet when she was 13. "We never went to the theatre in London because we couldn't afford it and we never went to the cinema and we didn't have TV. I wasn't exposed to any other form of drama."

At 17 she joined the National Youth Theatre, then went on to the Royal Shakespeare Company, hanging out in an artistic commune, near Stratford, later joining an experimental theatre group. She lived a bohemian life with other actors touring the globe.

"I was a would-be bohemian. I was always very attracted to the bohemian lifestyle and still am, to an extent."

She gained a racy reputation when she stripped off for a number of nude scenes, although that reputation is unfounded, she insists. "I was always taking my clothes off. I did a full frontal nude scene in the very first film I did, Age Of Consent, and almost every film ever since! I didn't acquire that reputation. I did in a small arena of tabloid newspapers but in another much wider arena of public consciousness, I was a well respected theatre actress."

Helen is never happier than when she has her family around her, yet those times are fewer than she'd like. She's recently made another two films, National Treasure, due for release later this year, and Inkheart, in 2008.

Despite her mammoth successes, she admits she still gets terrified before each performance.

"It's not to do with mistakes being made or accidents happening, it's a fear of not doing it as well as you want to do it, not being inspired as you want to be, falling short of what you want to be."

* In The Frame: My Life In Words And Pictures, by Helen Mirren (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20).