Helen in hot water over GQ interview

Helen Mirren has enraged a number of people over comments in a recent interview, where her earlier admission about date rape in her youth was revisited. Her remarks have been widely quoted, mis-quoted, commented upon and reacted to during the past few days. A number of people have written to the HMAS, either thinking they were addressing Helen herself or simply to say "how can you people admire such a person who said...". Some people have been sincere, upset and confused, others have been merely abusive, including sending death threats and flooding the fan club's inbox with obscenities.

The Helen Mirren Appreciation Society does not speak for Helen in any way, but over the 11 years we've been a formal organisation, we've had the pleasure of meeting Helen on several occasions and our impressions are clear: Helen is a genuinely kind, caring, decent and thoroughly "normal" woman. She doesn't watch her words like a politician, trained in communication and PR skills. Sometimes she says things that get people riled up. In a friendly interview situation, she speaks like you and I do with our friends, and not as someone aware of the impact her words might have on the world - particularly when taken out of context.

From our mailbox, It seems as if people have jumped to a variety of conclusions and impressions from third-person reports and partial quotes, taken out of context. People have attributed motives - for instance that Helen was offering advice or telling women what they could, should or shouldn't do - where we believe no such motives exist. As said before, we don't speak on Helen's behalf, but we believe that these are, in fact, inaccurate assumptions.

One of the reasons we admire Helen Mirren is because she doesn't behave or speak like someone the world should pay a whole lot of attention to - except when she's doing her job. She talks like your friends do, like you do - even when she's giving an interview and a tape recorder is running. Would she be better off if she were more aware of the size of the megaphone and the impact her words could have? Probably. Would the world be better off if Helen stopped talking like a real person, all flesh and fallibility, unguarded and without pretense? Not in our minds.


Here is the related segment from the GQ interview by Piers Morgan, in its entirety: (warning: some expletives used)

PM: You have hinted at the fact that you were date-raped when you were younger, more than once.
HM: I was, yes. A couple of times. Not with excessive violence, or being hit, but rather being locked in a room and made to have sex against my will.

PM: But you didn’t report it to the police?
HM: No, you just couldn’t do that in those days. It’s such a tricky area, isn’t it? Especially if there is no violence. I mean, look at Mike Tyson. I don’t think he was a rapist.

PM: Do you think if a woman voluntarily ends up in a man’s bedroom takes all her clothes off and engages in sexual activity in bed with him, she should always have the right to say “no” right to the last second, and if the man ignores her then it’s rape?

HM: Yes. But I don’t think she can have that man into court under those circumstances. I guess it is one of the many subtle parts of the men/women relationship that has to be negotiated. Times have changed. I hate young girls gong around beating each other up, but I love the fierceness of young girls nowadays, and the way they just say, “fuck off”, because I wish I’d been taught to say “fuck off!” when I was younger. I wish I’d had those words in my arsenal of self-defence. Instead, I was polite and didn’t have the courage to say that to men who wouldn’t accept “no” for an answer. I was pretty naïve, I went to a convent school until I was 18, and had never spent a night away from home, or gone to parties, or any of that. So I was very innocent when I went to college in London, and I was living on my own. And I found guys were horrible – mean, rude, insulting, and so without feeling. And I was looking for love and for someone who just liked me, made me laugh and was nice to me. And instead I just met all these creeps.

PM: What would you like your epitaph to be?
HM: “What’s next?”