Dame Helen Mirren has admitted that Prince Harry once jokingly called her ‘granny’, after she played the Queen.
Luckily for the actress, it seems that both Prince Harry and Prince William liked her acting performance as their grandmother Queen Elizabeth II.
The 73-year-old actress portrayed the British monarch in the acclaimed 2006 film which explored the queen and the Royal family’s response to the shock death of the princes’ mother Princess Diana in 1997. Her work in the role earned Mirren the Academy Award for Best Actress.
Mirren has met various members of the Royal Family and although Prince Charles – the queen’s son and William and Harry’s father – avoided discussing the movie with her the two younger princes were ‘very cool about it’.
Speaking to Ben Shephard and Susanna Reid on UK TV show Good Morning Britain, she said: ‘The younger [ones], Harry and William, have mentioned it and they’ve been very funny about it, very cool about it.’
The Caligula actress even recalled a moment where the Duke of Sussex Harry referred to her as ‘granny’ as a joke.
She said: “I think Harry once said, when I was at a awards ceremony, he said, “And Granny is here”.’
The Red star works with Prince Charles for his Prince’s Trust charity, for which she is an ambassador, but she insists he has never discussed her role as his mother Queen Elizabeth.
She said: ‘No, no, that’s never mentioned. That’s never mentioned, he is very, very tactful.’
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