Long-time readers will know that it’s my tradition, these last nine months, to use an image from the first place I think of the person I’m discussing. (This has been harder when I’m talking about behind-the-scenes people!) Dame Helen Mirren (I always mentally include the title) has been in a lot of stuff. She’s played three historical British queens. She’s been in productions of six Shakespeare plays as seven characters. (True—she was both Gertrude and Ophelia in the 1976 Hamlet, which I now want to see.) She’s played Ayn Rand, Sofya Tolstoy, Hedda Hopper, and Alma Reville. She has played Morgana and Caesonia. And when I picture her, I picture . . . Dame Helen Mirren.

This, I think, is because I admire the hell out of her personally. She’s been shutting down stupid sexist questions in interviews my whole life. If she wants to take a role, she does it, and she doesn’t let anyone tell her she shouldn’t. She’s been nominated for four Oscars, including her win for The Queen, but she’s also done, well, Caligula, and she’s going to be in Fast 8. No one matches Dame Helen Mirren for sheer chutzpah. To the point that, yes, I’m forced to say “chutzpah.”

I mean, she’s gone on record that she doesn’t want to play Doctor Who, but she at the same time said she felt it was time and past for a female Doctor, and in fact that she wanted to see a black, gay, female one. She’s blunt about the misogyny of ’70s films, which you know endears her to me—and she lived through it! She talks frankly about the attempts to sell her work on her looks, not her talent. She is the feisty, blunt, intelligent woman that feminism does best having speak out.

And, okay, she is a damn classy lady. She’s descended from minor Russian nobility on her father’s side, and despite having grown up in Essex and having had to cultivate that accent, she’s always projected an air of dignity, even naked. And she was naked a lot in the ’70s, and she’s a good-looking woman. Still. She’s aged beautifully. I don’t look that good now, and she’s only like a year and a half younger than my mom, who wasn’t all that young when I was born.

Every time a list comes up of people just shy of an EGOT, I want to figure out something Dame Helen Mirren can win a Grammy for. She should record an audio book, and the joy of her is that I’m not even sure it would matter which one. Anyone who can play in fairy tales and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover can read any book she wants to. Or, hell, she can just tell stories for an hour. I’m not proud; I’d listen to it.

One more story about her real quick. She was asked once, in a discussion of the NC-17 rating, what she would say to an eight-year-old sitting next to her while watching The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, and she kind of blinked and asked what kind of idiot would take their child to see that movie. Which is, let’s face it, a damn fine question.