London - Dame Helen Mirren has revealed she once sobbed about missing out on having children and grandchildren.
The 70-year-old has always maintained she had no interest in being a mother, saying that she had “no maternal instinct whatsoever”.
But now, while she said that most of the time she does not regret her choice, she admitted she wept after watching 1989 film Parenthood.
The actress said that the comedy-drama, which stars Steve Martin, highlighted her “loss” as it is “about the whole story of being a parent and how it never stops, even when you’re a grandparent”.
“I realised I would never experience that and for about 20 minutes, I sobbed for the loss of that and the fact that I never experienced it,” she told The Sunday Times’s Culture magazine. “Then I got over it and I was happy again.”
She who won an Oscar in 2007 for her starring role in The Queen, married American director Taylor Hackford, 71, in 1997. She previously added that they have an “unsentimental” relationship and married for “economic” reasons.
Asked in a 2013 interview with Vogue about her decision not to start a family, she said: “It was not my destiny. I kept thinking it would be, but I never did, and I didn’t care what people thought.”
However, she enjoys having an extended family through her husband, who has two sons from a previous marriage.
In her latest, wide-ranging interview, she also said she was “really sad” that women “weren’t allowed to play football” when she was young.
She said she never liked “girly” sports such as netball and would have been a good footballer, adding that she and Hackford joked about her legsbeing built like Wayne Rooney’s. She also praised Prince Charles’s “black spider” letters and hinted at having a soft spot for Jeremy Corbyn because of his “weird clothes”.
Daily Mail