From Cleopatra to Queen Elizabeth

In my childhood we used to make what were called ‘scrap screens’. We pasted magazine photographs, coloured and black-and-white postcards, reproductions, advertisements and flower friezes on to a folding screen, overlapping sometimes unevenly, to create a colourful collage; it was a pleasant, inexpensive pastime.

Helen Mirren’s In the Frame is a scrap- screen autobiography. Her story is copiously illustrated with luminous studio portraits of herself, snap shots, stage pictures, film stills and all kinds of memorabilia from letters and telegrams to school books and even Mrs Mirren’s ration book from 1953, an austere post-war memento.

Helen’s family was a remarkable one. Her grandfather, Pyotr Vasielivich Mironov, was a White Russian, a proud member of the military class and a loyal Tsarist who found himself stranded in London after the Bolshevik revolution. Like many aristocratic exiles, he scraped a living as a taxi-driver. The letters from his mother and sisters — discovered in a trunk by Helen — describing post-revolutionary deprivation and the running-down of their estate are heart-rending.