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has featured Helen Mirren in its New Year issue (January 2011)
Mirren tells us her:
- Red carpet secret
- What she's most afraid of
- Her style icon ...Helena Bonham Carter!
[Click on image to see larger version, and read the
adolescent responses of this 65-year-old actress]
Helen Mirren recently played as Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen,
and as Elizabeth I in a TV mini-series, Elizabeth I. Lofty roles for an actress
who wants to star with the gargoylic Bonham Carter, and act in a film by the
violence-obsessed filmmaker Quentine Tarrantino.
This is the kind of wisdom nonchalantly meted out by our reigning, seasoned celebrities.
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Ugliness rules. In clothing, in films, in art and even in our "representatives" of beauty. I don't think it is a lack of knowledge about beauty. We've developed standards and often unanimous agreement about what constitutes the beautiful. So I'm not going to into the beauty-hater's argument that beauty is relative; beauty can be objectively measured. What's going on is that people are hating beauty. It is a form of envy. If I cannot be beautiful, then why is she beautiful? It is like wealth, or intelligence, or a sense of entitlement to live anywhere one pleases. Spread the wealth, accept I.Q.ers of 91 into Harvard, let everyone from every corner of the world come into the prosperous West. Or youth. Why cannot I be as young (and attractive) as any fifteen-year-old, at my ripe old age of seventy? Such are the mantra of the equal-opportunity narcissists.
So, in order to fit in with their lowered standards, beauty magazines are (actually they have been, for decades now) publicizing ugliness in their fashion shoots, their models, and even with the "celebrities" and film actors they promote. There was a time when actresses like Elizabeth Taylor, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly and many more appeared in immaculate clothing, looking ethereally beautiful, at any age. And we admired them.
Now, we get Lindsay Lohan, whose pretty features at twenty have deteriorated into the haggard face of a drunk and drug addict. The fashion literati are so mercilessly attacking this young woman that it cannot be anything else but malice - envy. Let's make this pretty girl into a monster. Unfortunately, Lohan, for lack of guidance and role models, obliges them with the images they can gloat over.
Magazines just love the emaciated and ugly third world-baby-collecting, wife stealing Angelina Jolie (today's crimes of the so-called beautiful film actresses is exponentially higher than anything we've seen before). And the infantile costumes the gaga Gaga showcases gets highest honor and is copied by fashion designers. And Mirren admires this gaga. The list goes on but it is too painful to expand upon.
Our supposed icons and vanguards of beauty, who should be celebrating their femininity and aging gracefully, are as much caught in the traps of ugliness as is our modern, liberal, world. In order to be progressive, these modern, liberal actresses have to embrace what's out there, part of which they themselves have determined. So, they have to succumb to this ugliness in order to look acceptable. At the same time, with their naked, makeup-less faces and lost-innocent looks (they really are lost, but not at all innocent) they are also aspiring to look young. And since youth is no longer beauty, youth has become ugliness. And not because the youth necessarily want it this way, but because their role models have said it is so.
Hence, the disheveled, badly colored (yet I think this is deliberate, she is obviously "proud" to be gray, but also wants the look of a peroxide blond) hair of actress Helen Mirren who is the focus of the popular fashion magazine Instyle this new year.
We have come a long way!
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of the 1970s to the disheveled senior citizen in 2011.
Notice also the "nice" expression that Mirren holds in her 65-year-old pose, in 2011, as she gazes into the camera.
"I just want to look young and pretty."
What went wrong?