Helen Mirren Says ‘The Duke’ Director Roger Michell ‘Meant a Huge Amount’ to British Film Industry (Video)

thewrap.com:

died last September at age 65. “He wasn’t ailing. It was a very sudden heart attack that took him away. He meant a huge amount to the British film industry.Mirren even teased that she was “very cross” with Michell for his sudden death and wished she could’ve had the chance to work with him again either in film or in theater, but knows that “he left behind a very substantial body of work.” “From the first moment I met him and I walked into the meeting, there was a sense of ease, a sense of family.

He knew exactly what he wanted, he knew how to get it, but it was always done with this incredible feeling of welcome and love and family.

Ease, the set was an easy place to be,” Mirren said of working on “The Duke.” Mirren also acknowledges that at 76-years-old, “The Duke” was something of an “unexpected” role for her to take, and that few beyond Michell might have guessed that she and star Jim Broadbent would make a good on screen pairing.

Though Mirren has played countless larger-than-life characters throughout her career, “The Duke” casts her as Dorothy Bunton, a retired housewife in ’60s England who is married to the eccentric, politically inclined former cabbie Kempton Bunton.