Helen Mirren in "The Queen"

Helen Mirren recently won the Oscar for playing Her Majesty in "The Queen" after the death of Princess Diana - a sequence full of events that nobody could have predicted.

To play Elizabeth II, Helen Mirren immersed herself in the monarch's psychological world. "I watched a lot of film, read all the books I could," she says. "The most valuable was written by Marion Crawford, who was their nanny and also their teacher, the woman in charge of Elizabeth and Margaret from when they were little kids. I found myself drawn toward the young Elizabeth, the person she was before she was queen.

Mirren was also struck by 20 or so seconds of film shot when Elizabeth was 12. She's coming out of a car and she's got her little socks on and her little coat with a velvet collar and gloves. She's meeting a dignitary and she puts her hand out. She doesn't smirk, she doesn't wriggle, she doesn't look around at the cameras. She does what she has to do as well as she possibly can.

It was a demanding role, perfect for Mirren, and she'd shine again when playing the second Queen Elizabeth in The Queen (given her aristocratic Russian background, the pair might actually be related).

Directed by Stephen Frears, this would see Mirren play the monarch in the midst of the furore surrounding the death of Diana, trying to follow protocol and tradition while the country is demanding a wholly inappropriate state funeral. It was another brilliant performance, with Mirren taking the emotional repression she'd exhibited in Gosford Park and Prime Suspect to its painful limit.

One thing Mirren learned from playing two Elizabeths is that the rulers shared a name and not much else. "No sycophancy was too much for Elizabeth I," she says. She just adored being flattered and lied to, in a way. She wouldn't countenance anything else.

The movie depicted an aging queen losing her long-time lover and falling for a much younger man. The 61-year-old Mirren made for a sexy monarch, even without the benefit of any obvious cosmetic surgery. "Power is sexy," she says. "And if a woman is extremely powerful and extremely wealthy, she becomes sexy. It's just that women don't often have that position."

Will she continue to bare her body as she passes through her sixties? And will she continue to scrap it out with Dench, Smith, Rigg etc to see who's the greatest of them all, snapping up the prizes as she goes? The answers are probably, hopefully and definitely.

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