Helen Mirren and Jim Broadbent talk The Duke in new interview

The Duke is based on the true story of a 60-year-old taxi driver, who stole Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery and Oscar-winning actress Helen Mirren stars alongside fellow screen veteran Jim Broadbent

Dame Helen Mirren and Jim Broadbent star in The Duke, a film about the life of Kempton Bunton who was charged with stealing Goya’s Duke of Wellington portrait from the National Gallery.

First up is Helen Mirren

76 year-old legend Helen is still often described as a sex-pot, but Mirren is far from glamorous in her new role. In The Duke, the final film from director Roger Michell, who died last September, she plays charlady Dorothy Bunton, the drab, worn-down, perpetually on her hands and knees wife of real-life character Kempton Bunton (Jim Broadbent).

What attracted her to play Dorothy? “I loved the character and because the Queen is sticking to me like an old Band-Aid…” Sorry? We both collapse into laughter. “While I am profoundly honoured,” Mirren adjusts herself and does a little bow, “and I honestly couldn’t think of a more interesting and profound person to be stuck on me, nonetheless I am an actress and so I did want to break free a little bit.”

Mirren has played the “old Band-Aid”, aka the Queen, to award-winning effect – landing an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a Bafta for The Queen, and a Tony and Laurence Olivier Award for The Audience on stage. She also played Elizabeth I (the only actress to have played both Elizabeths on screen) in the eponymous 2005 television series.

“But the minute I saw the first scene, of Dorothy on her knees scrubbing out the fireplace,” Mirren says, “I thought, ‘Yeah, that’s a great role,’ and obviously working with Jim is absolutely delightful.”

The story of The Duke is that of a real-life Newcastle cab driver prosecuted in 1965 for the theft, four years earlier, from the National Gallery of Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington.

Kempton Bunton is an infuriating but rather wonderful man of 60 – working-class, self-educated (he’s forever writing plays and sending them to the BBC, only to be rejected) with strong beliefs and many bug-bears, chief of which is that the television licence is “an unfair tax on ordinary people for those who can’t afford it”.

Mirren has played unglamorous women before in her long career; going back to her standout role as DCI Jane Tennison in Lynda La Plante’s Prime Suspect. Then there was her housekeeper in Robert Altman’s period mystery Gosford Park, where, she points out, “I had no make-up on and was very restrained” – but her Dorothy is Mirren as we’ve never seen her before: drudge-y and joyless with the pressure of having to cater to her maddening, idealist husband Kempton.

“Women are always on the front lines in wars. It’s women you see running to get the water, trying to escape the snipers, and the men are the snipers. So women have always been on the front lines, in a way – just without a gun in their hands, and with no means of defence.”

Jim Broadbent interview

Jim Broadbent appears on the screen, blinking and as gently off-beam as the characters he plays; more reserved, if anything, with his voice occasionally sinking into a mumble like a verbal shuffle. In the background of his London study, a fire is blazing, walls of books on either side, with curious puppet sculptures in glass domes on the mantelpiece or perched on the edge of shelves.

His late parents, Doreen and Roy, were both artists as well as keen amateur actors, and their son inherited both interests and talents, as well as their love of Lincolnshire where he was born in 1949 and, until recently, owned a house himself. Broadbent and his wife Anastasia Lewis, a painter and former theatre designer, spent their entire lockdown there but sold the house recently to move back to London: “It simplifies life to take away responsibilities as you get older.”

The dearly loved actor has done some amazing work and, like Mirren, has won awards galore: an Oscar and a Golden Globe for his supporting role as Iris Murdoch’s husband John Bayley in Richard Eyre’s Iris; a BAFTA and Golden Globe for playing Lord Longford in the television film Longford, as well as being in a roll-call of practically any cherished British film you care to mention.

The Duke, in which Broadbent plays the lead role of Kempton Bunton, is one of those slightly deceptive English feel-good films with appealing characters and wry, sometimes sly humour, but which is, au fond, about important issues.

“I loved every aspect of the script [by Richard Bean and Clive Coleman],” Broadbent says. “The humour, the characters and the story. And the fact that there is a point to it. It’s a dig at the Establishment, which is always fun, and is always needed. The Establishment is portrayed beautifully. They get a good kicking!”

Do you admire Bunton? “I sort of loved him. His heart is so much in the right place and he’s so flawed and he’s such a muddle. He loves his wife but he lies to her.

“But then I’ve been fairly selfish myself with my career and putting myself out there. I’ve been obsessed with acting to the exclusion of other people’s interests. I must have been extremely frustrating to my wife an awful lot. Hopefully, I haven’t lied blatantly,” he says, with a sound somewhere between a sigh and a chuckle. “Well, I’m not anything like the degree of obsessive I used to be but it’s something I recognised in Kempton.”

His wife seems to have stuck by him for a long time (they’ve been married for over 30 years), and she was in the business, so… “Yes, she knew what she was in for!”

Broadbent says that the BBC is very important to him, but he doesn’t have any of the answers as to how it should be funded. He agrees with David Dimbleby’s comments that you can’t have public service broadcasting without paying for it, but the poorest shouldn’t be charged the same fee as the richest – “That seems reasonable to me.”

Kempton Bunton seemed to go to prison on something of a regular basis for his principles: has Broadbent ever been to prison himself? He says that as a student he performed at Holloway and when preparing the role of Lord Longford (the great champion of prisoners’ rights, including, controversially, those of Myra Hindley) visited several different prisons in Lancashire.

“I did spend a night in prison once when I was a student,” he admits. “I was with some student friends and I’d had too much to drink so I said I would lie in the back of a friend’s car to sleep it off. But as I was getting in, I was arrested.

“I said, ‘What are you arresting me for?’ And the policemen said, ‘For being drunk and incapable.’ And I said, ‘What am I incapable of?’ And they said, ‘Looking after yourself!’ and that’s when my argument stopped! It was just one night, so I was in and out.”

At 72, he says his health is all right, but memory loss is annoying. Nowadays he makes sure he learns his lines well in advance, whereas he used to wait until rehearsals started. His mother suffered from dementia in her early 80s and he played a character with dementia in Paul Abbott’s 2011 mini series Exile with John Simm. “I think it’s something that worries everyone,” he says, “like when you can’t remember the name of someone you know so well.” Is he given now more to hope or despair? “Despairing hope.”

Finally, we talk about how he declined an OBE, saying that there were more deserving recipients than actors. “We get treated well all the time. Actors who get these awards have all won lots of treats along the way doing what they love doing – they don’t need more presents.”

And then he adds, with a glimmer of mischief: “But the main reason for turning it down is this. Richard Eyre, when asked why he accepted his knighthood, said, ‘Vanity’, and when I’m asked why I turned it down, I say the same. ‘Vanity. Not a good look. Didn’t suit me.’ ”

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