Helen Mirren
"Apart from my sister, she is the only other person who has been a total constant in my life ever since I came to consciousness. The Queen was there and that's an incredible rock I think to have in your life."---DAME HELEN MIRREN 'The Diamond Queen', BBC.
Charlie Hebdo (Paris Shooting, Jan 2015)
Helen’s grandfather was Russian, Pyotr Vasielivich Mironov, an aristocrat
connected to the military. The son of a countess and a senior military
officer, he rose swiftly through the army's ranks. He came to London to buy arms
to aid his countrymen in the Russo-Japanese war, living in luxury in the Russian
embassy with his wife, Marusia and sending son Basil to a private school. He
then founded himself stranded due to the Bolshevik revolution, leaving six
sisters on the family estate at Gzhatsk, near Smolensk (Gzhatsk was in 1968
renamed Gagarin after cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, born in the nearby village of
Klushino). During the revolution, the sisters would be forced to leave their
home and live in a crammed flat in Moscow, the family losing their property and
status forever and really only being saved from a sorry death by one of the
sisters, Valentina, marrying a high-ranking communist official. Interestingly,
given Helen's later career, Valentina would be a typist fro the great
Stanislavsky. Forced to leave the Russia embassy and now jobless and homeless,
Pyotr would take a job as a cab driver. The poverty and loss of status would
take its toll, and he'd separate from Marusia in 1928.
And the family did have status. When, in later years, after the fall of the
Soviet Union, Mirren and her sister Katherine did some research into their
background, they found that they were descended from famed military dynasty the
Kamenskys. Field Marshal Mikhail Kamensy had enjoyed success in the
Russo-Turkish war of 1768-1774 and been awarded the Order of St George of the
Second Class, the highest Russian military honour. In 1806 he'd be made
Commander in Chief of the Russian army fighting Napoleon but, not up to the job,
would be sacked the next year. Two years after that he'd be axed to death by a
15-year-old boy, the brother of one of Mikhail's young concubines. Mikhail's son
Nikolay, meanwhile, was also a lauded general.
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