Dame Helen Mirren reminisces about first seeing Psycho for the home entertainment release of Hitchcock
Academy-award winning actress Dame Helen Mirren has enjoyed a rich and varied career over five decades and shows no signs of slowing down.
After making her stage debut in the 1960s, she appeared on the West End and Broadway and worked steadily and successfully in feature films – from The Long Good Friday to The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover.
Her stardom has only grown with the years, with her BAFTA-winning performance in the television series Prime Suspect and her Oscar-winning performance as Queen Elizabeth II in the Stephen Frears-directed drama The Queen (2006).
In Hitchcock she works for the first time with fellow British screen legend Sir Anthony Hopkins, who plays Sir Alfred Hitchcock. She is Alma Reville – Hitchcock’s wife and, it turns out, crucial collaborator on his classic works, including the seminal shocker Psycho.
Helen Mirren spoke to us from London, to discuss great advice, playing a real person and bringing to light the woman who was crucial to the “Hitchcock touch”...
What was your first reaction when you were approached about the film?
When I was very first approached about the film, it was interesting but I was not quite sure the script really worked. Anyway, it wasn’t financed. A lot of scripts fly around like that and you never know, or can be sure, if this film is ever actually going to be made. They say “We’re working on it can we come back with another draft?” and you say, “Yes. that’s fine, of course you can.” ?I went through a couple of drafts like that over, possibly, a couple of years. I can’t remember how long it was. Then Sacha [Gervasi, the director] came onboard and I met with him and he said, “I just want to hear what you feel about the script.” I thought, “Oh God – this is going to be a complete waste of time!”, because it so often is.
Not because I didn’t have faith in Sacha, but because you don’t know whether the film is going to be greenlighted and you feel your brain is being picked, it’s all going to probably come to nothing. But I met with Sacha and he was absolutely delightful. He said, “Tell me where you feel the script should be worked on, developed on, what are your problems with it.” I sort of, very inarticulately, mumbled about a couple of things. Then Sacha went away and a few months later he just came back with this fabulous script that he had worked on and developed and just pulled all of the elements that were in the film already, pulled them together in a way that just made the script work and be cohesive and somehow make sense. At that point me, my agent and my husband all looked at each other and went, “Whoa! This is really good. We should say yes to this.”
People don’t know how important Alma Reville was to Hitchcock – she tells him the truth, no matter how successful he becomes...
Yes, telling you the truth but also being pro-active in the editing and the creation of the script and the writing of the script. It wasn’t just that she was a woman who said, “No, that doesn’t work Alfred.” She was someone who was absolutely proactive in the creation of the work, I think. Not to take the ultimate ownership away from Hitchcock, but Hitchcock himself said, and many other people said, “There are four hands on making a Hitchcock movie and two of them were Alma’s.”
She’s a creative force in her own right...
Absolutely. It’s very interesting, I read the book written by her daughter [Patricia Hitchcock O’Connell, whose book – co-written with Laurent Bouzereau – is called Alma Hitchcock: The Woman Behind The Man] and that was my number one source material for the character. The daughter wrote the book about her mother, not about her father. Although she adored her father – it was a very close, little family, really very close and really suburban in a funny sort of way.
She chose to write a book about her mother, because she did want to give her mother the credit that she felt she deserved. Alma herself was very content. I think she saw it as a partnership, as a true partnership, and she knew her role in that partnership. In knowing and being confident in the truth of that, she didn’t particularly feel the need to publicise it. She knew part of the attraction of the brand, if you like, of Hitchcock’s films, was this Hitchcock character himself. That only accrued to the value of the movies anyway, if you know what I mean. She was a part of the brand, a part of the firm.
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