At 77, Dame Helen Mirren looks even more radiant than when she first appeared on the scene back in the ’80s. Most of which she puts down to confidence – the kind you can only get with age. “Your life as you get older gets fuller,” she says. “You get wiser, too, inevitably, because you know more stuff.”
It is this confidence that will see her through her upcoming red carpet appearances at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, where she’s attending with L’Oréal Paris. She attended the grand opening and premiere of Jeanne du Barry on the first night of the festival with striking blue hair that perfectly matched her blue power dress, and carried a fan with the #worthit in block capitals.
“The very first time I came to Cannes was so intimidating and terrifying and overwhelming,” she muses. “Now I can kind of laugh at it and enjoy it. I see it as a performance.” Her top tips for navigating the experience? “You must have a dress that fits you. Ideally a dress that’s comfortable, but that’s rather idealistic because so many of these dresses are not comfortable, but they look amazing.”
As for hair and make-up, Mirren is always up for a bit of experimentation. In 2019, she walked the red carpet with a fresh bubblegum pink rinse, while last year she took her stunning silver locks taken to new lengths in a long slicked back ponytail. In fact, having exceptional hair has become a signature for Mirren, and there have been extensive Vogue articles dedicated to it as a result.
“I’m not a big hairdresser person,” she says. “I always used to cut my own hair, I certainly never dyed it, apart from privately with my L’Oréal Age Perfect Hair Dye. But I grew it long during COVID and now I can flick it all over my shoulder. I quite like the fact that it was sort of against the rules for women of my age to have long hair. There’s an unspoken rule that you’re not supposed to have long hair. Or if you do have long hair, you’re supposed to have it all neatly up in a bun.”
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In fact, when it comes to beauty rules, in general, Mirren isn’t a fan. “I don’t think there should be any rules and luckily there are less and less. I grew up in a world where there were all kinds of rules as far as women were concerned, and then saw people like Madonna come along and break them all. She was totally a woman after my own heart. All rules are made to be broken.”
As She Turns 79, Enjoy 10 Of Helen Mirren’s Most Iconic Grey Hair MomentsGallery10 PhotosView Gallery
That said, there is one rule she stands by and that is to do with acceptance. “Accepting who you are, finding confidence in it and not resisting it is the best beauty advice. You know, the minute you have confidence and you’re not trying to be something that you’re not, everything about you relaxes – your face relaxes, your muscles relax – you’re happy.” Words to live by, indeed.
