DESPITE the formidable height of her lavender platform heels, Dame Helen Mirren breezes into the room with a dancer’s grace. After declaring the view of the Hollywood hotel’s pool “disappointing”, she spots a tray of oversized pastries. “I’m on a diet,” she says glumly.

And though she is too well-mannered to have them whisked out of her sight, something in her regal posture makes it clear that draping a napkin over the tempting sweets is the only civilised thing to do. The gesture is met with a gracious “thank you”. 

To the millions who gawped at that famous photo of Helen’s tanned and toned midriff on a Puglia beach, it may be no surprise that the actress watches her figure. Last year’s topless magazine photo — a bold portrait of her in the bath, unabashed and au naturel — only proved that her sex appeal has no expiry date.

Indeed, as demure as she is, Helen delights in a bit of shock and awe. On the talk show circuit, she often tells audiences she used to shop at the Hollywood stripper boutiques down the hill from her house for the cheap five-inch heels she wore to red carpet events. And she has expressed controversial political views.

“She is our punk queen,” says Russell Brand, who got to know Helen when the two co-starred in the forthcoming remake of the 1981 comedy Arthur. “She’s got a matriarchal authority, but she’s very, very sexy. I would happily lay for hours my head upon her legs and look at her.” 

Considering her deep fondness for Russell, Helen just might oblige him. (She pinched a pair of his pants from the Arthur set and plans to have them framed!) The mere mention of his name during our chat brings her to tears. “He’s extraordinary,” she gushes.

Today, Helen sports a pixie haircut, a bright, off-the-rack frock and an endearing fragility. Her spiky edge is absent today. But there’s no denying that kind of emotion is a huge part of Helen’s appeal — sweet humility with spirit. No wonder she got on so well with Russell, a complicated character in his own right. 

The two actors (and Russell’s mother) became friends in between takes on the set of Arthur. Helen plays the stern but soft-hearted servant to Russell’s man-child Arthur. (Russell championed Helen for the role, even though the original part was played by a man, Sir John Gielgud.)

“He’s one of a kind, Russell, he really is,” Helen says. “That’s a rare thing nowadays. I was so full of admiration for him. He’s had such awful stuff thrown at him and it’s just so unfair. It drives me crazy.”

She pauses to dab at her eyes. As she lifts her latte to her lips, a crude little tattooed star on her hand reveals itself. “He is a naughty boy,” she says. “There’s no question about that. But a kind, naughty boy. As many naughty boys are, of course.”

Helen is a master of sharp observation, a biting wit that even in her youth set her apart from the other blonde and buxom beauties crowding stage and screen. She has been cast as an intellectual vixen since her late teens, playing Cleopatra at the Old Vic and during her early years at the Royal Shakespeare Company. 

How does she feel about being perceived as this dreamy, sexy older woman? “It doesn’t feel like anything,” she says, equal parts amused and ambivalent. “I don’t think about it. I don’t consider it. It’s always been with me. It’s like the wind blowing past. It was a pain in the butt when I was younger.” She pauses then chuckles. “But I don’t mind as much any more.”

To hear her talk, this saucy side took some cultivation. She was a humble Catholic schoolgirl from Leigh-on-Sea in Essex who “didn’t know anything about anything.” She was born Ilenya Mironov, the granddaughter of a Russian nobleman whose fortune disappeared during the Russian Revolution. 

Her father, though educated for a time in London private schools, supported his family as a cab driver. Her mother was a working-class London girl with some gypsy blood from a family of butchers. Her great-grandfather was a butcher to Queen Victoria.

“I grew up in a middle-class family who were living in a working-class economic situation,” she explains. “It was a real struggle for my parents. There was always the sense that conversation and education were important. As important for their two girls as it was for their boy.” 

Helen has said that her parents were “anti-monarchy”, but clarifies that their disdain was directed at the aristocracy, not the royals. She is cheered by the fact that Prince William has chosen to marry Kate Middleton, an ordinary girl who also has the character that the lifestyle demands.

“I love where she comes from and who she is,” Helen says. “You see them together and they’re easy with each other. They look at each other with genuine interest and love. They make each other laugh. It takes a very special person to step into that world. I think she had the advantage that Diana didn’t have of a monarchy that’s really moved on.”

As a teenager, Helen spent summers waiting tables at her aunt’s Brighton B&B yearning for an acting career, yet readying herself for teacher training college. One rainy afternoon, in between shifts, she fled into “a funky, smelly little art cinema” to watch the Italian film L’avventura. “You know, for a 16-year-old who’d never been abroad or anything, I never ever forgot it,” says Helen.

She followed her father’s wishes and attended teaching college, but she never taught. Instead, she landed a spot with the National Youth Theatre and for the next few years she worked simultaneously at a teaching degree she didn’t really want and at a stage career she longed for passionately. 

As soon as she left college, the acting world opened up for her. But after a provocative on-screen role as a painter’s young muse Helen found that male critics and chat show hosts were hard to handle. There was a mid-70s interview with Michael Parkinson, an excruciating encounter that can now be seen on YouTube. Helen recently discovered it online and was impressed to find that at 30 she had enough poise to deflect a barrage of veiled come-ons!

“Outrageous!” she says. “That was the first talk show I’d ever done. I was terrified, so young and inexperienced. And he was such a male chauvinist. He denies it to this day that it was sexist but, of course, he was.”

It was around that time that Helen made an impulsive visit to a palm reader who told her that she’d find her greatest success after 40. Recently she has been outspoken about the lack of ageing actresses in film. “I resent having witnessed the survival of some very mediocre male actors,” she told a meeting of Hollywood female executives, “and the professional demise of the very brilliant female ones.” 

But Helen has cut her own path independent of cinema’s mass market. And she has worked feverishly in her 60s, the last couple of years being some of the busiest of her career. 

She opened 2010 with another Oscar nomination, for her depiction of Leo Tolstoy’s wife in The Last Station. She went on to make half a dozen more films, a mix of big-budget features and indie dramas. She says that winning the Oscar for The Queen, in 2008 “just suddenly popped me out there. I was asked to do films that I really wouldn’t have been asked to do before.”

Last month she released Brighton Rock, an adaptation of the 1938 Graham Greene novel, updated to 1964 during the riots between the Rockers and the Mods. She plays Ida, a curvy redhead with a tantalising past. From there, she moved on to something far from bosomy glamour, The Door, in which she plays an enigmatic and odd Hungarian housekeeper whose suffering is eased by a friendship with the writer who employs her. 

That probably won’t open until next year and, after Arthur, it will be Helen’s last on-screen performance for a while. She has taken a few months off to relax, although she hopes to return to the theatre.

She is comfortable with life, dividing her time between her homes in the Hollywood Hills and London. At 65, she’s also that rare thing: an actress who has kept both her body and her career hot without going under the knife. But has she never felt the pressure to have a nip and tuck? 

“I’d love to do that!” is her surprising answer. “Maybe, who knows, in my future. I don’t think we should say, ‘You mustn’t do that! Oh, I’d never do that,’ all that rubbish. I think whatever makes people feel happy without . . . I think a lot of people absolutely physically destroy themselves. You see this a lot here in LA.” 

She describes a recent encounter with two women who had indulged in some enhancements. Their lips made them look like “huge platypuses or ducks or something,” Helen says, turning her own lips inside out to illustrate. 

“I went, ‘Wow, look at those two American women!’ And I heard them talking and they both had British accents. Oh dear! 

“But I do think people should do whatever makes them happy. Even those ladies with the ridiculous lips. If they look at themselves in the mirror and they go, ‘Wow! I look good!’ so what?”