I keep saying we’ve got to find another word for ‘beauty,'” Dame Helen Mirren said as she waited for her cue backstage at a catwalk show in Paris. “I think we should start calling it ‘character’ instead of beauty, because that’s really what it is.”
It was Fashion Week in the city last fall, and Mirren was arguably the star of the L’Oreal show at the grand Monnaie de Paris, where she was joined by actresses Amber Heard, Eva Longoria and Andie MacDowell, and singer Camila Cabello. When she finally hit the catwalk Mirren didn’t just walk, she ran, barefoot, her flowing Giambattista Valli gown billowing behind her.
At 74, Mirren has taken on an innumerable number of characters during more than a half-century on stage and screen. Her first role was Cleopatra, no less, in a stage production of “Antony and Cleopatra” when she was 20.