Dame Helen Mirren has many treasured photographs of her family, but there is one that is particularly special. It shows a little boy, dressed in a velvet belted tunic with a lace collar, perched on a chaise longue, his gaze confident and direct.
'The spoilt young scion of an illustrious Russian family,' as Dame Helen puts it. That little boy is Dame Helen's father Vasiliy, pictured a few years after his birth into a Russian family of immaculate pedigree – aristocracy on one side, military might on the other. As part of the established old order his life should have been mapped out. 'Nothing less would have been expected of him than to serve the future Tsar,' Dame Helen recalls.
Yet his destiny was dramatically different. He'd been brought to England in 1916 as a three-year-old by his father Pyotr, who had been sent to London by his military superiors to secure arms. The next year the Russian Revolution left the family stranded in London, unable to return home.
Dame Helen as her usual glamorous self, left, and right in the film Woman In Gold
And so the little boy who learned to walk on a fine Russian estate and who was enrolled in private school in London when he first arrived would go on to leave school early and, like his father, find work as a taxi driver to support his own family. He never returned to Russia.
Little wonder Dame Helen admits to finding that sepia-tinted childhood photo moving – all the more so because it took her many decades to discover that far from perishing in the Gulags, as she believed, many of his family had survived, meaning she had relatives in Russia. In 2007, 50 years after her grandfather's death, she finally met some of them, in a highly charged encounter that left her in tears.
Undoubtedly, she was able to draw on those emotions for her latest film, Woman In Gold, in which she plays a real-life character, Maria Altmann, who was forced to abandon her gilded world in Austria by the Nazis and start life afresh thousands of miles away.
Many years later, in her 80s, Maria sets out to retrieve the family's possessions stolen by the Germans. It's not hard to imagine that some of the film's glittering early scenes, filmed in the grand drawing rooms of 1920s Vienna, could just have easily taken place on the sprawling estates of Mirren's own noble ancestors.
Helen as a toddler: Raised in Leigh-on-Sea in Essex, she has always been proud of her Russian ancestry
Dame Helen has always been proud of her Russian ancestry. Although she was raised in Leigh-on-Sea in Essex, she was christened Ilyena Mironov and her roots are deeply embedded in the countryside to the west of Moscow where, for generations, her family owned a sprawling, handsome estate, Kuryanovo. It is here that that childhood picture of her father was taken, before his family left for England.
Mirren's great-grandparents were moneyed and firmly, proudly Tsarist, with a number having distinguished themselves in the Russian military. Their son Pyotr, Dame Helen's grandfather, was the much-adored only boy among their seven children, and given his background it was inevitable he would join the armed forces too. 'He was,' Dame Helen recalls, 'a proud and loyal member of the Tsarist army.'
By 1916, with World War I now raging, he was selected to join a small delegation sent to buy military supplies from the British. By then Pyotr was a family man, and brought with him his wife Marusia and their three young children Irina, then five, baby Olga, and three-year-old Vasiliy, Mirren's father. Little did he know that they would never return home.
They travelled light, arriving in London with only Pyotr's typewriter, pictures of the Tsar and Tsarina, a few roubles and his wooden military trunk, made for him on the family estate. What more might they need? As representatives of the Tsar, they were honoured guests of the British government, accommodated in luxury quarters within the Russian embassy.
Helen's grandparents Pyotr and Marusia on their wedding day
Then, in 1917, came the Russian Revolution, which overthrew the old order. In Russia, the aristocracy were stripped of their land and homes, while in London the Mironovs were stranded, horribly aware that if they tried to return home they would be executed by Lenin's troops.
Penniless and with few prospects, Pyotr had to do whatever he could to feed his family. 'The only way my grandfather, with his halting English, could earn money was in the time-honoured way of immigrants: as a taxi driver,' says Dame Helen.
It was a path later followed by her own father, Vasiliy. 'After the abrupt ending of his privileged lifestyle in the Russian embassy in London, he set about earning a living playing the viola, at which he excelled, and working in a fabric warehouse in London's East End. It was there that he met my mother, Kathleen, or Kit, as she was known to her friends and family,' Dame Helen recalls.
The family moved to Leigh-on-Sea where Vasiliy did his stint as a taxi driver before becoming a civil servant. Convinced it was in his three children's interests to assimilate into British society, he anglicised his name – becoming Basil Mirren. His daughter Ilyena, meanwhile, became Helen, while her sister and brother were given the utterly English names Katherine and Peter.
Grandfather Pyotr, though, never let go of his memories – which he loved to share with his granddaughter as she sat on his knee. 'I was captivated by his descriptions of this faraway life on the estate he loved, explaining to me where the stables were and his mother's roses,' she recalls. 'He was reliving his past by telling it to me.'
Helen's father Vasiliy as a little boy
His consolation came in the form of the beautifully written letters, sent by his mother and sisters, in which they write of stoic forbearance of life in post-Revolution Russia. For years they languished in the Mirren family loft, stored in that wooden trunk Pyotr brought with him from home.
It would be years before Dame Helen was to uncover their poignant content – but when, with the help of a translator, she was finally able to read them, she was profoundly moved. 'The letters are painful in their descriptions of the deprivations of the Russian people,' she says.
Removed from Kuryanovo by the revolutionaries, Pyotr's mother lived out the remainder of her days in a grimy flat, knowing her beautiful home had been reduced to rubble through neglect.
Even so, her only thoughts are for her son. 'It's frightful to think of you in a foreign land without work, and it's very hard for me not being able to help you, my priceless Petrusya,' she writes to Pyotr in 1921. 'But however difficult my separation from you is, I would never ask you to come over here my darling.'
In another, in 1928, his sister Valentina writes of how he is remembered 'with great fondness'. 'My heart will always be open to you and feels the pain of every sadness you suffer... I kiss you with all my strength my dear Petrusyenka, and mingle my tears with yours.'
From 1931 the letters stopped, as the Stalinist purges took hold. 'It obviously became too dangerous to write,' Dame Helen recalls.
Yet right up to his death in 1957, Pyotr never gave up hope that one day the Mironov clan might be reunited – a wish fulfilled by his granddaughter when, half a century after his death, Dame Helen flew out to Moscow to meet the descendants of her ancestors, including the children of three of her great-aunts, Pyotr's sisters Olga, Lydia and Valentina.
The Mironov family home at Kuryanovo
It was the culmination of years of yearning on the part of his granddaughter. 'I tried so hard to find Kuryanovo – looking on maps and the internet,' she says. 'But the name of the local town was changed by the Soviets –I feared we would never see it.'
Then, as she was losing hope, meticulous research by a Russian-based journalist enabled her to fulfil not only her own but her father's dream: as well as the fact Dame Helen and her siblings have living relatives, descendants of her grandfather's sisters, family maps also allowed them to locate the ruins of the estate snatched from their ancestors.
She visited as soon as she could, in June 2007, just four months after winning the Best Actress Oscar for The Queen, and accompanied by her sister Kate. Clearly overcome by seeing the landscape encapsulated in her grandfather's photos, she says it was a privilege to stand on the site where her family had lived, loved and laughed a century earlier.
'My great-grandmother Lydia's pink roses, which she so adored, were still there,' Dame Helen recalls. 'It was a part of the world my grandfather's family loved so deeply.'
Later that day, the sisters had an emotional meeting in a Moscow café with extended members of the Mironov clan, during which, overcome, they both burst into tears. 'I hadn't expected to feel close to them so quickly but there was a real sense of family,' Dame Helen says.
It's a sentiment Maria Altmann, her character in Woman In Gold, would doubtless recognise. It's a magnificent role for any actress and Dame Helen is extraordinary as Maria, perfectly capturing her anger and sense of betrayal but also her pragmatism and lack of self-pity. And little wonder: while the film may focus on stolen paintings it is about so much more – about the legacy of war and family upheaval, a subject she knows about only too well.
A night-time escape and a heroic fight for justice
In the film Woman In Gold, based on a true story, Helen plays Maria Altmann who attempts to retrieve her family possessions stolen by the Nazis during the war - among them two Gustav Klimt paintings of her glamorous aunt Adele.
Maria was born in 1916 into the Bloch-Bauers, a wealthy Viennese Jewish family who regularly invited composers and artists including Klimt to their salons.
In 1937 she married Fritz Altmann. But the next year the Nazis placed the Bloch-Bauers and Altmanns under house arrest and seized their treasures.
Maria and Fritz managed to escape one night by feigning a medical emergency and fled to Holland and then California, where they raised four children. But many of Maria’s relatives were killed by the Nazis.
Meanwhile, one of Klimt’s paintings of her aunt hung in Vienna’s Belvedere Museum. Maria believed it was there legitimately, until in the 90s she found out the museum knew some of its artefacts had been stolen from Holocaust victims. It sparked a quest for justice that took her all the way to America’s Supreme Court, and in 2006 Austria was ordered to return the art to Maria and other family heirs. The Klimt painting now hangs in New York's Neue Galerie.
© Helen Mirren, 2007. Adapted from In The Frame by Helen Mirren (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £18.99). Woman In Gold is in cinemas now.
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