Helen Mirren is probably best known to American television audiences as Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison, the complicated and obsessive homicide and vice detective of Prime Suspect. However, Mirren, who began her acting career playing Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth in Royal Shakespeare Company productions of the 1960s and 1970s, has appeared in more than 30 productions for British, Australian, and American television. These have included film or taped versions of Royal Shakespeare productions, original television plays, and dramatic adaptations of literary classics (e.g., the British Broadcasting Corporation’s [BBC’s] serialization of Balzac’s Cousin Bette, which eventually appeared in the United States on the Public Broadcasting Service’s [PBS’s] Masterpiece Theater) produced by Granada, Thames, and other companies for the BBC, ITV, and Channel 4 in Britain and such American television series as Twilight Zone (the 1980s version) and The Hidden Room (Lifetime cable production).

The stage training that Mirren received in her teens and 20s encouraged her to embrace diverse roles and risky projects on stage, television, and screen (including a couple of notorious X-rated European art films). As with many such classically trained British actors, her breathtaking acting range and frequent appearances in every dramatic media made stardom elusive. Prime Suspect, first aired on British television in 1991, finally made this 25-year acting veteran an important international star. When it was broadcast on the American PBS series Mystery! in 1992, it became that show’s highest-rated program, won an Emmy, and made Mirren, according to some television journalists and executives, PBS’s “pin-up woman” of the decade. Four Prime Suspect series have followed.

Critical consensus attributes the success of the television series to the collaboration of Mirren and writer Lynda La Plante, who created Jane Tennison as a composite of several female police detectives she interviewed. La Plante did not want to compromise their integrity by making Tennison’s character too “soft,” so she considered casting critical to the success of her vision of the character and these professional women. La Plante found that Mirren had the kind of presence and “great weight” the writer believed crucial to the character: “[Mirren’s] not physically heavy, but she has a strength inside her that is unusual . . . . There’s a stillness to her, a great tension and intelligence in her face.”

Mirren has claimed that she likes Tennison because she is “unlikable.” The complexity of Mirren’s performance resides in how she conveys this unlikability while still making us sympathetic to Tennison’s ideals and vulnerability. The character is clearly discriminated against because of her gender, and she knows it, but her own behavior, especially in personal relationships, is not beyond reproach. The tension that La Plante admires in Mirren’s face also permeates the stiff posture Mirren adopts for the character, the quick pace of her walk, the intense drags she takes on a cigarette, and the determination of her gum chewing. Tennison, that unlikable yet sympathetic character, is given life in Mirren’s world-weary eyes, which do not betray emotion to her colleagues, except when she lashes out in often justifiable anger. In private, however, the eyes express the losses suffered by a successful woman in a masculine public sphere.

Throughout the 1990s, Mirren continued to play strong, even eccentric characters on British and American television. Losing Chase (1996) is the story of a woman whose nervous breakdown becomes a way to opt out of a life as wife and mother. She learns to respond to others again when she falls in love with another woman. In the British miniseries The Painted Lady (later aired in the United States on PBS’s Masterpiece Theater), Mirren played a faded rock star turned sleuth. The decade ended with her Emmy Award–winning performance as cult novelist and radical individualist Ayn Rand in Showtime’s Passion of Ayn Rand (1999). Yet Mirren continues to be identified with Jane Tennison of Prime Suspect. For a time, Universal was working with Britain’s Granada Productions on a theatrical feature, but Paramount had rights to the property in 1999, when it allowed them to lapse back to author Lynda La Plante. Mirren had responded strongly to rumors that she was not being considered for the film role because she was “too old” to attract a wide audience (Meryl Streep allegedly refused the role because Mirren was so closely associated with it), but it is unclear to what extent the casting controversy had to do with the feature film industry’s decision to withdraw from the project. This much is clear: although American and British television made strides in the 1980s and 1990s in depicting strong, complex women in law enforcement, for many viewers and critics Mirren’s performance finally enabled “a real contemporary woman [to break] through the skin of television’s complacency.”