Dame Helen Mirren’s 10 Best Roles of Her Legendary 60-Year Career

We’re starting with a bang, and that is Helen Mirren’s role as Chris Harper in 2003’s Calendar Girls. Even in 2003, Helen Mirren was not scared to “bare it all” for the camera.

This is a hilarious comedy about a group of more mature ladies who decide to make a fun calendar to make money for a local hospital. Only the calendar goes way beyond that and becomes a massive hit and sees them get global fame. This is a fun, charming, and hilarious story that makes you feel good by the end of it thanks to the amazing work that these ladies did. It is easy to see why Helen Mirren was nominated for an award due to her performance here.

This is not the first time Helen Mirren will be playing royalty on this Helen Mirren’s 10 best roles list! I remember being kind of freaked out by the trailer for The Madness of King George, the part where he’s running all confused towards the camera!

Anyway, enough of that, we are here to talk about Helen Mirren and in this movie, she plays the role of Queen Charlotte. Seeing her have to deal with the deteriorating mental health of her husband can make this a rather brutal and hard-hitting watch! However, she does a wonderful job and this was recognized by her Oscar nomination for her role. At the time, her nomination was a bit of a shock, but when you watch the movie now, it is easy to see why she was nominated.

Here we have a very underrated movie that came out around a decade ago: Eye in the Sky. This is an action thriller where Helen Mirren plays the role of a colonel who is trying to win a war against terrorists in Africa.

The twist here is that she makes a very difficult decision that results in a massive international incident – and the way she deals with it is what the heart of the movie is all about. She delivers a very powerful performance here. The way the movie deals with the devastation and ethics of using drones in war makes this an incredibly interesting movie and one that sticks with you for a while after the credits have rolled.

While Hitchcock seemed to be a movie you had to try really hard to love, there’s no denying that Helen Mirren was the heart of this 2012 movie. She played the role of Alma Reville, the wife of Alfred Hitchcock. Here we see the way that she would help keep things calm… well, as much calm as there could be on an Alfred Hitchcock set!

Mirren was more than worthy of the various nominations she earned for her performance in this movie. The fact that this film is more about a specific period of time in Hitchcock’s life (during the filming of Psycho) makes it a rather unique biopic. It may not be a great movie, but Helen Mirren is certainly great in it.

We continue our Helen Mirren’s 10 best roles list with another biopic! This time around, she is playing the role of Sofya Tolstoy, the wife of Russian writer, Leo Tolstoy. The Last Station is about the later days of Leo’s life and the fight between Sofya and Vladimir Chertkov, who was Tolstoy’s editor and a key part of his work.

On paper, this should be a rather dreary kind of movie, but Helen Mirren’s portrayal of Sofya is fantastic and easily the most entertaining aspect. Due to her fantastic performance in The Last Station, Helen Mirren would get a nomination for the Best Actress Oscar.

Here we have a classic and very entertaining “whodunnit”. This has a fantastic cast and a huge part of that cast is Helen Mirren as Mrs. Wilson, who is the head housekeeper. A bunch of very wealthy and upper-class people are having fun at a big fancy English manor when a murder happens!

We get to see the events of the murder and the investigation from the point of view of many different characters. This is such a fun movie and it has a real dark and dry sense of humor that makes it very entertaining. A fun bit of trivia about Gosford Park is that this movie was what would ultimately spark the idea of Downton Abbey which initially was going to be a spin-off!

Here we are for the second time on this Helen Mirren’s 10 best roles list that she played a Royal! The fact that the real Queen Elizabeth II loved Helen Mirren’s performance says all you need to know about this movie!

This is set around the death of Princess Diana and the fallout that came as a result. This is a powerful movie and if you have any interest in the British Royal Family, you will find this fascinating. To say that Helen Mirren nails this role is the understatement of the century. She literally gave everything that she had to this role and the performance is spectacular. It’s uncanny the way she looks, talks, and acts like the real Queen in this movie!

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is the perfect blend of style and substance and is easily the most controversial and brutal movie on this entire list. The violence and nudity will shock you if you are not used to seeing Helen Mirren in something like this.

Here she plays the role of Georgina Spica, the wife of a gangster and he is very abusive towards her. She ends up falling in love with a man, her gangster husband finds out, and as you would expect, there is a lot of violence as a result. This is such a great movie and if you want to see a different side to Helen Mirren, this is the movie to watch.

While you may not be shocked to see 1981’s Excalibur on here, you may be shocked to see it so high. I love this movie! This is a take on the King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table story and Helen Mirren plays the villainous Morgana Le Fay, who is determined to take down her half-brother.

This is epic fantasy, swords, and sorcery stuff. Fantasy movies were very popular during the 80s and this is up there with the very best of them. It’s fair to say that to this day, no other movie has done as much justice to this epic story as this one did. Helen Mirren is amazing as the lead villain and you can tell that she was having a blast playing this character.

While I am just name dropping the first RED movie on this Helen Mirren’s 10 best roles list, she is just as much fun in the sequel RED 2. In RED, we have an aged group of former agents who are pulled back in when a killer shows up and starts trying to take one of them down.

Helen Mirren is amazing as a former MI6 assassin who may or may not still do a little killing on the side. She is so great in this movie and you can tell that she’s having a blast in the role. She is awesome in both movies, but it is more than fair to say that RED 2 is not quite as good as that first movie. This showed that Helen Mirren could still be a tough and pretty sexy as an older woman. This was such a clever movie, taking a bunch of older actors and giving them another shot at being an action star and it not only worked, it worked perfectly!