Dame Helen Mirren has revealed a fortune teller told her she would be successful, but only after she turned 40.
The veteran British actress, 81, spoke at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival in Georgia last weekend and recalled that she feared being unable to land any work in her early 20s, when she was an aspiring actress.
Discussing atypical career trajectories with drama students at a screening of her new film, A Talent for Murder, she said she had sought the counsel of a palm reader.
The Academy Award winner said: “The whole thing is an adventure. When I was about 23 and desperately ambitious and dreaming big dreams … I was very on the outside of my chosen profession.
“My parents weren’t in it, I didn’t have any money. When you’re outside of the mix, it seemed such a distant, impossible thing to ever reach. And I felt I would never get there.”
Dame Helen went on: “But I so wanted to be an actress, I was so driven, but I just had no idea how I was going to get there. So … I went to a fortune teller to find out my future.”
Recounting her experience, the MobLand actress recalled visiting “this little Indian guy living in a very funky house in the suburbs of England” who charged her £5, which she described as “a fortune at the time”.
She continued: “And he gave me a whole sheet of papers and a pencil and said, ‘I’m going to read your palm and I’m going to tell you what’s going to happen to you, but I want you to write it down because you’ll find that I speak very fast and if you don’t write it down, you’ll have forgotten what I said.’
“So, he looked at my palm and then he started talking and he did talk very, very fast. I was writing, writing, writing … then he sort of came out of it five or 10 minutes later [and] he said: ‘That’s it, thank you for the £5’ and sent me off with this sheath of papers that I’d kind of forgotten what I’d written that was my life, my future.”
At that time, she had starred as Cleopatra in the 1965 production of Antony and Cleopatra at The Old Vic in London, a role she landed when 20.
After attracting attention for the breakout part, she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in the late 1960s and obtained her first major feature film role in The Age of Consent in 1969.
Dame Helen told the students that she immediately went to throw the fortune teller’s papers away in the “nearest rubbish bin”, because “I thought what I want it to be [is] an adventure, I don’t want to know”.
However, she recalled “one thing that he said”, explaining: “He said, ‘You will be very successful, but you won’t really reach the height of your success until you’re past 40.’
“Of course, when you’re 20, you don’t want to hear that … [So] I pretended I hadn’t heard that, didn’t remember it, but he was absolutely right incidentally.”
In 1991, Dame Helen landed her career-defining role as Det Ch Insp Jane Tennison in the television series Prime Suspect, when she was in her 40s.
She subsequently won three Baftas and an Emmy for her depiction of the single-minded and resilient DCI, which also became a blueprint for modern female TV detectives.
“That was when I did Prime Suspect,” she said of the fortune teller’s prediction, adding: “I’d done a lot of theatre and movies and everything, but I didn’t really become sort of publicly famous until I was in my early 40s.
“He was totally right, but I didn’t want to know. So, it’s much better for it to be an adventure, honestly.”
Dame Helen went on to win an Oscar for her leading role in the 2006 film The Queen, directed by Stephen Frears, in which she played Elizabeth II. She has received three further nominations for her roles in The Madness of King George, Gosford Park and The Last Station.