Dame Helen Mirren wanted to be a French actress.
The 68-year-old star has played the head of the British monarchy in ‘The Queen’ but she’s admitted that her new film role as a restaurant boss in the South of France in ‘The Hundred-Foot Journey’ is the character she most relates to.
She explained to HELLO! magazine: "What I loved about [‘The Hundred-Foot Journey’]- I could pretend I was a French actress for the first time in my life."
Helen revealed that whilst she was a teenager living in the South East of England, she dreamt of becoming a French actress and even bought a property in Paris.
She shared: "When I was growing up in my teens , the French just seemed to be the coolest, most chic people on the planet and I desperately wanted to be French. I got myself a French boyfriend and that was the closest I could get to it.
"I did a film in France and I loved being there. I rented a little garret and it was literally one room on the top of a house on the Left Bank and it was very bohemian. I thought I would literally just go to Paris and just sit there until I became a French actress."
However, it was never to be as Helen was getting more recognition in her native England.
She reflected: "I kept getting work in England, which I had to take because I had to pay for the garret in France and then it just never worked out."
Dame Helen Mirren wishes she was a French Actress
