Dame Helen Mirren, 76, admits she still fears she'll be found out

Posted on : 02/20/2022
Dame Helen Mirren, 76, admits she still fears she'll be found out
Celebrities 

Dame Helen Mirren, 76, admits she still fears she’ll be found out – 56 years into her stellar career

  • The actress, 76, admitted that she still struggles with imposter syndrome 
  • She said: ‘You can never be absolutely sure that you’re good at what you do’ 
  • She is set to receive a lifetime achievement award from LA Screen Actors Guild

She’s a feted actress who’s won an Oscar and an armful of Baftas – yet Dame Helen Mirren today admits that she still struggles with impostor syndrome, 56 years into her stellar career.

In an interview with You magazine, the actress says: ‘I think of myself as still being the way I was in my mind, in my body, through my 20s, 30s and 40s: struggling, ambitious, frustrated and self-critical.

‘I still feel the same person. I wonder if that ever goes?

‘There’s always that endless, niggling feeling: “Oh God, I’m going be found out any minute now. I got away with it that time, but the next time I’ll be found out.” Because you can never be absolutely sure that you’re that good at what you do.’

Next Sunday, Dame Helen will add to the scores of accolades she has won – including a Tony and an Olivier Award for playing the Queen on stage in London and on Broadway

Next Sunday, Dame Helen will add to the scores of accolades she has won – including a Tony and an Olivier Award for playing the Queen on stage in London and on Broadway, as well as a clutch of awards for Prime Suspect – when Kate Winslet gives her the lifetime achievement award from the LA Screen Actors Guild.

Describing Dame Helen as ‘quite simply a brilliant and luminous talent’, the guild’s president, Fran Drescher, said: ‘She has set the bar very high for all actors and, in role after role, she exceeds even her own extraordinary performances,’

Not that the modest 76-year-old agrees. ‘I genuinely do not feel I remotely deserve it, except that I’m still alive and working,’ she says.

‘I’ve done some wonderful films and I’ve done some pretty awful films. It took me by surprise, completely.’

On Friday, Dame Helen will return to the big screen with The Duke, which tells the true story of Kempton Bunton, a retired bus driver who apparently stole a Goya portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in 1961 in protest at the Government’s lack of help for pensioners.

‘The Duke has the feeling of those wonderful Ealing comedies,’ says Dame Helen. ‘It’s very much in that tradition.’

She plays Kempton’s wife Dorothy, opposite Jim Broadbent.

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