Helen mirren

Last year, I wrote a feature for this magazine in which, disturbed by the apparent revival in the British gangster genre, I counseled a degree of caution as to its practitioners’ apparent lack of discernment in their approach to the tropes and clichés of the tradition. “We will be left," I concluded, "with the cinematic equivalent of bald men fighting over a comb: a boot, stamping on a human face for all eternity, while someone calls someone else ‘a slag.’ It is not, perhaps, the most enticing of prospects.” If the Guy Ritchie-Tom Hardy collaboration MobLand is not as hideous a creation as this suggests, it is also something of a disappointment given the cast and creative talent involved.

The death of Dame Maggie Smith at the age of eighty-nine represents not just the end of a very English tradition of acting that she exemplified, but a passing of a generation. With the exceptions of Judi Dench and Eileen Atkins, there are no few grand dames of British stage and screen surviving; there is a distinct difference between, say, Smith and Helen Mirren, who pivoted early to the cinema and has largely remained there ever since. Smith was a consummate actress for film — she won two Oscars and was nominated for plenty more — but it was the smaller environs of television and stage where she truly excelled. A misapprehension about Smith is that she was a camp, OTT presence. This impression is largely derived from her latter-period work in Gosford Park (in which she was superb..

In 1997, the Swedish pop act Aqua released a novelty single which combined being hugely popular with being even more irritating. Entitled “Barbie Girl,” it was a helium-voiced ode to the wonders of the famous Mattel creation, dusted with just enough ironic detachment to allow the musical connoisseur to believe that they were savoring a joke, while giving the unreconstructed pop lovers everything they could hope for. The lyrics are especially lamentable: the chorus declares “I'm a Barbie girl, in the Barbie world/ Life in plastic, it's fantastic/ You can brush my hair, undress me everywhere/ Imagination, life is your creation.” It was successful for a while, sold a huge number of copies and can, very occasionally, still be heard on the radio.

Catherine the Great is the vanity project of star and executive producer Helen Mirren. One way you can tell it's a vanity project is that Mirren is 74 years old while the character she plays — at least at the start of the mini-series — is 33 years old. Now I don't wish to be ungallant. It's certainly true that Mirren has always scrubbed up well. She is a very handsome woman and she knows she is a handsome woman, as reflected by all those films and TV series earlier in her career — not, though, The Queen, as far as I recall — when she appears with her kit off.