Helen Mirren

Helen Mirren — actress with roots in the Russian Empire

She was born Ilyena Lydia Mironoff in west London in July 1945, and the surname she is known by was adopted only when she was twelve.

Her paternal grandfather, Pyotr Vasilievich Mironov (1880-1957), was a colonel and military engineer in the Imperial Russian Army who had fought in the Russo-Japanese War and later served as an emissary of Nicholas II. The family held a large estate near Gzhatsk in Smolensk province; his own mother was Countess Lydia Andreevna Kamenskaya, a descendant of Field Marshal Mikhail Kamensky of the Napoleonic wars.

In 1916 Pyotr was sent to London in a small delegation to negotiate the purchase of arms for the Russian army. He brought his wife Marusia and three small children, among them Helen's father Vasily, then three years old. They travelled light, expecting to be housed as official guests of an allied government and to go home when the business was done: by one account they carried two portraits of the tsar and tsarina, a typewriter, some roubles and a wooden trunk.

They never went back. The revolution ended the mission, the estate and the family's standing together, and the delegation's funds with them. Pyotr, a convinced monarchist who could not return, spent the rest of his life in London driving a taxi. Letters from relatives in Russia stopped arriving in 1932. He died in 1957 without seeing the country again, and his papers from the Russian Government Committee in London survive in the archive of University College London's School of Slavonic and East European Studies.

Only after his father's death did Vasily Mironoff change the family name - he had not wanted to hurt him - becoming Basil Mirren, a viola player with the London Philharmonic who also worked as a cab driver, driving examiner and civil servant. His daughter Ilyena became Helen.

She trained with the National Youth Theatre and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1960s, and has since won an Academy Award, an Olivier, a Tony, Emmys, BAFTAs and two best actress awards at Cannes. She was made a Dame in 2003.

Two of her roles carry the family history oddly. She won the Oscar for playing Elizabeth II, and in 2019 played Catherine II of Russia - a British queen and a Russian empress, performed by the granddaughter of a tsarist officer who drove a London cab because the empire he served had ceased to exist while he was abroad on its business.

Tracing the roots — Smolensk / Moscow

The family name was anglicised to Mirren only in 1957, after her grandfather's death. His papers from the Russian Government Committee in London are held at UCL's School of Slavonic and East European Studies.

Born Ilyena Lydia Mironoff. Her grandfather Pyotr Vasilievich Mironov (1880-1957) was a colonel and military engineer of the Imperial Russian Army, sent to London in 1916 to negotiate arms purchases and stranded there by the revolution. Through his mother, Countess Lydia Andreevna Kamenskaya, the line descends from Field Marshal Mikhail Kamensky.

Historical context

Russian Empire · c. 1721–1917

Smolensk / Moscow. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.

Map: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA)

A career defined by ambition