Mirren’s University Challenge!

Dame Helen on hard work, dreams… and her most colourful co-stars yet.

She’s one of Britain’s greatest stars but Helen Mirren’s latest role may be her strangest yet.

She is the voice of Dean Hardscrabble a cross between a red dragon and a giant centipede in Monsters University, the latest blockbuster from US animation giants Pixar.

It’s the follow-up to the box office smash Monsters Inc but, in fact, it tells the story of Mike and Sulley in the days before the first film.

Helen’s character in the prequel is the stern head of the school for scarers.

And she is less than impressed by the scholarly efforts of our heroes from the first film who are voiced again by Billy Crystal and John Goodman.

Campus rivals at this stage rather than the friends they become, the pair are forced to work together when a petty squabble leads to Hardscrabble dropping them from the university’s programme for trainee frighteners.

Their only way back is to sign up on a team for the school’s “Scare Games”, since the winners automatically earn internships at the Monsters Inc factory. But the only team that needs two extra members is made up of the college’s oddballs and also-rans.

Meeting up in the appropriate surroundings of London’s King’s College, which Disney took over for the day to promote their movie, Helen tells me how the film carries a message for young people taking their first steps in today’s ultra-competitive job market.

“I think that it’s very annoying to go through life and I think we all experience this watching people who never seem to be challenged, and they just get everything they want, without having to work for it.

“The rest of us do have to struggle and fight and get knocked back and we have to come forward again I think that’s why we identify so strongly with these two characters Mike and Sulley, because most of us have had that.

“It’s only the privileged few who can waft through life without ever meeting any adversity or difficulty.

“Following your dream is all very well, but without the hard work it’s nothing.

“This movie very adroitly and very elegantly teaches that lesson to young people, because too many think all you have to do is have a dream and it will happen. Success is 10% inspiration and 90% sweat and hard work. Even then, there are no guarantees.”

Although past the age of retirement, Helen carries herself like a woman 15 years younger and is still energetically searching for new opportunities to learn.

She has just completed a West End run resurrecting her Oscar-winning turn as the Queen in Peter Morgan’s stage play The Audience and as well as the release of Monster’s University this month she has appeared alongside Al Pacino in a television dramatisation of the trial of Phil Spector (which aired on Sky Atlantic last week).

She can be seen again at cinemas from August 2 with Bruce Willis, Anthony Hopkins and Catherine Zeta Jones in a sequel to action comedy Red.

“I’m very lucky and it’s incredible fun,” she concludes.

“Every stage of my career has been a little bit different but there’s always been really interesting things to do.

“You make choices in your career, and with some of them everyone’s looking at you going, ‘What are you playing that for?’. But you have to, sometimes, jump in at the deep end and do stuff that you’re not familiar with, that you think you’re going to fail horribly at.

“As my headmistress once told me: ‘The only thing you have to fear is fear itself’.”