I love that country [Israel]. — Helen Mirren

I love photography, and I love the art of photography. — Helen Mirren

I’m a naturist at heart. I love being on beaches where everyone is naked. Ugly young people, beautiful old people, whatever. It’s so unsexual and so liberating. — Helen Mirren

I’m not strong–willed actually. I’m a complete pushover. I love to be told what to do. — Helen Mirren

I am British. I love Britain for all its faults and all its virtues. My husband is American and I am largely based in Los Angeles, but whenever someone asks me where home is, I automatically say ‘London.’ — Helen Mirren

I think we all have a dream of what it would be like not to work and grow heirloom tomatoes, and I do have that dream, it would be lovely. I do love gardening and all of that, but I do love my work. — Helen Mirren

Love is a command to rise to one’s highest potential, the best and noblest vision of ourselves. Love is a reward, the greatest we can earn, granted to us for the moral qualities we have achieved in our lives. — Helen Mirren

You could build three hospitals with the cost of one film and I take that very seriously. — Helen Mirren

I do know keanu reeves very well. keanu reeves dId a fIlm wIth my husband and keanu reeves Is just keanu reeves, so she’s a lucky gIrl and I’m sure that keanu reeves’s keanu reeves. — Helen Mirren

All you have to do is to look like crap on film and everyone thinks you’re a brilliant actress. Actually, all you’ve done is look like crap. — Helen Mirren

I hate people eating on film. I hate it even worse on the radio, when people eat on the radio. I just can’t stand it. — Helen Mirren

People often ask me whether I prefer theater or film, and the answer is that I prefer the one I’m not doing: The grass is always greener. — Helen Mirren

When you do a voice in an animated film, you don’t see the finished product at all. You’re not animating. You’re not doing the voice on the finished product. You’re doing the voice long before. — Helen Mirren

Once a film gets into production, the actors sometimes begin to have more input than a writer does. — Helen Mirren

I have done film, television and theatre–all at a pretty substantial level–I don’t think it’s possible for American actors to do that. — Helen Mirren

I’ve always found as an actress that the best thing to do in film or TV or theater is just to lose yourself in it. Think of the story, the character, the worlds we’re in, and forget everything else. — Helen Mirren

As you get older naked stuff [on film] gets easier. It’s more to do with the role than what men in the audience think. There’s a liberation about it. — Helen Mirren

I think it’s always hard for people to get their head around the fact that populist, commercial films can also actually be great works of art. — Helen Mirren

I loathe, I hate, chick flicks. — Helen Mirren

I don’t get to play the same role over and over in different movies. The roles that I get to play are quite varied, which is great. — Helen Mirren

Gardening is learning, learning, learning. That’s the fun of them. You’re always learning. — Helen Mirren

The trick in life is learning how to deal with it. — Helen Mirren

You have to go through the long, painful process of learning techniques to be able to recognize a ‘good accident’ or a ‘bad accident. — Helen Mirren

I’m terrified of learning lines, and I’ve always been terrified that I won’t learn them. — Helen Mirren

I learned quite early on in life that we are all two people. And one of those people none of us will ever know. — Helen Mirren

You write your life story by the choices you make. — Helen Mirren

You write your life story by the choices you make. You never know if they have been a mistake. Those moments of decision are so difficult. — Helen Mirren

The control and understanding of our personal fears is one of the most important undertakings of our lives. — Helen Mirren

You know, you have to allow life to play itself out, don’t you? And one thing you learn is that it doesn’t stop. It moves on. — Helen Mirren

Where you grew up becomes a big part of who you are for the rest of your life. You can’t run away from that. Well, sometimes the running away from it is what makes you who you are. — Helen Mirren

I don’t think it’s good to try and change anyone. The trick and the mystery–of relationships and life in general–is to learn to live with the bits you don’t like. — Helen Mirren

Actors are rogues and vagabonds. Or they ought to be. — Helen Mirren

I certainly think that he [Alan Rickman] was a kind of actor who needed to grow into his maturity to realize the potential, the huge potential that he had. — Helen Mirren

I resent having witnessed the survival of some very mediocre male actors and the professional demise of the very brilliant female ones. — Helen Mirren

As an actor, those are the roles that you long for. You always want something that’s going to kick your last role out of the water and put you off on a new path. — Helen Mirren

Americans are very good at animating voices. I don’t know why. They have a freedom with them that we British actors find more difficult to get to. — Helen Mirren

American actors who voice animated movies are so brilliant at it, because by the nature of American speak, it’s full of energy and full of commitment. And as a British actor, we have to kind of learn that. — Helen Mirren

Ill–informed intuition is fantastic–it’s what great art is. So really old painters or writers or actors are brilliant, because they’ve finally reached the point when they can let go of al technique. — Helen Mirren

Writers can get very angry when an actor says, ‘I don’t know, I don’t feel very comfortable with this line.’ Sometimes though, you’re working with a writer for whom that is simply not apt–like Harold Pinter. — Helen Mirren

A woman with knowledge is something that frightens the status quo quite a lot. — Helen Mirren

Humor in a relationship is so important. Many women will say that. Some say, ‘If they can make you laugh, it’s the sexiest thing on earth.’ — Helen Mirren

The role of women has always been undervalued in the spy world, always undermined in terms of recognition. Unfairly so. It’s a world that needs women. — Helen Mirren

Two phrases I hate in reference to female characters are ‘strong’ and ‘feisty.’ They really annoy me. It’s the most condescending thing. You say that about a three–year–old. It infantilises women. — Helen Mirren

Women have got to stop being polite. If I ever had children, which I don’t, the first thing I’d teach a girl of mine is the words ‘f–off.’ — Helen Mirren

Women are always self–effacing and self–denying. There’s a term that enrages me, and I always used to swear that I’d never play characters described that way. The term is ‘long–suffering. — Helen Mirren

I think every woman in our culture is a feminist. They may refuse to articulate it, but if you were to take any woman back 40 years and say, ‘Is this a world you want to live in?’ They would say, ‘No.’ — Helen Mirren

There isn’t a King Lear for women, or a Henry V, or a Richard III. You reach a level where you can handle that stuff technically and mentally, and it’s not there. — Helen Mirren

I love men that love women. Morgan Freeman, who I worked with on ‘RED,’ was very flattering to me. But he is flattering to all women. He is a woman–charmer. — Helen Mirren

In Shakespeare’s day it was women who were being burned at the stake as witches… not men. The men were thought of as alchemists. But women doing the same thing would be a witch and would be burned. — Helen Mirren

When I was making films [early in my career] there were very, very few female directors, and there were certainly no women on set, which made taking one’s clothes off all the more difficult. — Helen Mirren

I’m a would–be rebel. The good girl who’d like to be a bad one. — Helen Mirren

Acting is acting, but acting is different in almost always every project, and very, very different in this context. — Helen Mirren

The best actors are children and dogs because they’re not acting at all. — Helen Mirren

I’ve been working every year since I started acting, and I got many awards before I won the Oscar for ‘The Queen.’ — Helen Mirren

They’re called action scenes because they do the acting for you. You don’t have to act in action scenes. — Helen Mirren

I knew I wanted to engage in the world of the imagination, but it was not economically feasible for me to study acting, so I went to a teachers’ training college. — Helen Mirren

There’s no good way to waste your time. Wasting time is just wasting time. — Helen Mirren

I remember thinking, when I was in my early 30s, that this is the best age to be, and I still believe your 30s are a wonderful time. — Helen Mirren

I do think it’s well over–time to have a female Doctor Who. I think a gay, black female Doctor Who would be the best of all. — Helen Mirren

The two have always been in a symbiotic relationship, i always used to say film is alive and well and living on television in england at that time. and i think that’s still The case. — Helen Mirren

Wherever I am in the world, if I get free time when I’m filming I always hire a car, take to the road, drive for miles and explore. — Helen Mirren

Hollywood is a very small world; the people who matter matter, and the people who don’t matter are just like nothing. — Helen Mirren

I believe that if you want to go make your mark on the world you’ve got to go out and do it. Don’t be shy, be adventurous. — Helen Mirren

I think still it is very fine not to want children. There are far too many people in the world. It is my contribution to ecology. — Helen Mirren

What I feel personally and what I can act are two different things. Maybe one of the great pleasures of my job is being able to inhabit worlds that you are never going to inhabit personally. — Helen Mirren

The important thing is to bring people with Parkinson’s into our world and for the public to have a real understanding of it, as they’ve beginning to have with autism. — Helen Mirren

It has nothing to do with clothing or makeup. Just put your shoulders back and chin up, and face the world with pride. — Helen Mirren