Helen Mirren reflects on process of ageing: ‘It’s not brilliant, but neither was 25’
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Dame Helen Mirren has reflected on the process of ageing in the public eye as she admitted “it’s not brilliant”.
However, The Queen star, who is also an ambassador for charity Age UK, said that she was embracing the process for what it is.
“I’m 79. I never thought I’d be 79,” she told Evgeny Lebedev on the Brave New World podcast, which aired on Thursday (24 October).
“And then you say, okay, well, this is it. This is what 79 is, you know. And it’s kind of okay. It’s not brilliant. But it wasn’t that brilliant to be 25 either.
“So it’s not a question of seeking youth at all. It’s a question of living the life you have as fully and positively and enjoyably and confusingly and everything that it was when you were younger. It’s just called life.”
Responding to Lebedev’s comments on her “young spirit”, Miren quipped, “No, it’s not. My spirit is the age that I am. Maybe because I’m positive or I enjoy certain things.
“Or I’m fairly healthy, luckily so far, and I’m sure all that will go pear shaped quite soon. But, you know, this is the reality of being me. It’s not being young.”
Reflecting on her life and career, the Les Misérables and Phantom of the Opera star considered herself “lucky” to reach old age as she referred to the deaths of people who have died while in their youth.
Mirren said she wished that Nirvana musician Kurt Cobain for example, could have seen the invention of satellite navigation.
“I always say it’s so sad that Kurt Cobain died when he did because he never saw GPS as it’s the most wonderful thing to watch my little blue spot walking down the street. I just find it completely magical and unbelievable,” she said.
The star had more sobering predictions for the future as she said she was grateful for having spent most of her life in a “world without technology”.
“Because from this point on, the human world will only know technology unless there’s some unbelievably catastrophic event and only a few people left on the planet,” she said.
“And everything, everything has been destroyed from this point on. For the rest of humanity, however long humanity survives, it will be a world of technology. And I’m so grateful that I was of a generation that knew the world before technology. And you know we will die out eventually.”
