12:56am UK, Thursday September 22, 2011
Oscar winning actress Dame Helen Mirren has told Sky News the London riots will have a damaging effect on UK tourism and the days of 'cool Britannia' are gone.
Dame Helen Mirren plays a retired Mossad agent in her latest film The Debt
The actress, who won an Academy Award for her role as The Queen, says US tourists, in particular, "will be put off."
She told Sky News while promoting new film The Debt: "It is so sad, isn't it, to go from 'Cool Britain', whatever it was 10 years ago, to now, the perception of Britain."
"Every country is full of complexity and the trouble with the press in general and the public's response is, it is much too simplistic.
"These things will pass and the effects of the riots...it has a short time effect."
Mirren plays a retired agent in the spy drama film, released on September 30, which last night had its London premiere.
She says she owes her performance to co-star, Jessica Chastain, who plays a younger version of her character in the film.
Set in the two different time eras, the story begins in 1997 and looks back to a mission undertaken by Rachel and two male Mossad agents to capture a Nazi war criminal in East Berlin in 1966.
Mirren said: "I think in terms of this film I was incredibly lucky that I had the great, the wonderful talent of Jessica Chastain.
"Ultimately the performance is Jessica's - because she sets it all up, the complexity of the character, she sets it up."
Chastain is one of the hottest actresses in Hollywood at the moment starring in box office smash The Help and alongside Brad Pitt in Tree Of Life.
She claims Mirren has been more than "generous" in her comments - and says they both helped create the character.
Helen Mirren credits her performance to rising star Jessica Chastain
"That's crazy!" she said, "I am so inspired by Helen Mirren."
"We rehearsed two days before we shot the film - we worked on the accent, the back story, we picked a mannerism we would mirror throughout the film.
"The fact she said that is so generous of her because we absolutely worked on the character together."
The actresses had to convey how Rachel is haunted by the memories of World War 2 and is forced to face one of those who persecuted the Jewish people.
Mirren, 66, says Hollywood is starting to get better at providing interesting roles for older actresses.
"I think the world around Hollywood is changing - and Hollywood, above all, is an industry and, like all industries, it responds to the requirements of the public.
"The public are starting to ask for different things, which is great and Hollywood is responding to that."
She says that as more women acquire more "powerful and "high profile roles" then the entertainment industry is forced to reflect it.
"You see a talking head on television and it is the head of the IMF, or something, and it can be a woman, so when that starts happening, Hollywood responds and it is not just Hollywood, it is television, it is theatre."
"Until Mrs Thatcher came along they would never write a woman as prime minister but now of course they can, they will and they do."
The Debt also stars Tom Wilkinson as Stephan Gold, one of Rachel's accomplices in the 1966 botched mission, who thirty years later is attempting to cover their tracks.
Unlike the female actresses, Wilkinson did not confer with Marton Csokas who plays the younger version of himself.
He told Sky News: "I think if we had had got together, you would have put something together that would have been quite false.
"My guess is my 22-year-old persona is radically different from one 30 years later. I didn't think it was necessary."
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