Helen Mirren at the BBC (The Changeling / The Apple Cart / Caesar and Claretta / The Philanthropist / The Little Minister / The Country Wife / Blue Remembered Hills / Mrs. Reinhardt / Soft Targets)

• Helen Mirrens Oscar winning performance in The Queen and her Golden Globe winning performance in Elizabeth I are merely the capstones of an illustrious and distinguished 40 year career. Ever since she wowed theater audiences as a 20 year old at England s National Youth Theater, Mirren has brought a fresh and commanding presence to all her roles. New for the first time, BBC Video presents nine d

The Emmy®-winning crime series seen on PBS

"A perfect marriage of astoundingly talented actress and brilliantly conceived character" --USA Today

"Riveting" --The Boston Globe

Oscar® winner Helen Mirren is Detective Jane Tennison, "one of the great character creations of our time" (The Washington Post), in a series that won more than 20 major international awards and raised the bar for police dramas.

Tenacious, driven, and deeply flawed, Tennison rises th! rough the ranks of Britain’s Metropolitan Police, solving horrific crimes while battling office sexism and her own demons. “Rare is the drama that works so well on two levels: as a crackling whodunit and as a finely tuned character study of a strong but insecure woman trying to prove herself in a man’s world” (Time).

Seen on Masterpiece Theatre and Mystery! and created by crime writer Lynda La Plante, Prime Suspect features some of Britain’s biggest stars, including Ralph Fiennes (The English Patient), Tom Wilkinson (Michael Clayton), Zoë Wanamaker (Poirot), David Thewlis (Harry Potter), Mark Strong (Sherlock Holmes), Ciarán Hinds (Jane Eyre), Tom Bell (Reilly: Ace of Spies), and Jonny Lee Miller (Trainspotting).

Contains coarse language and graphic content Helen Mirren's Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison, the only female DCI on an old boy's club London homicide squad, is like a phantom lurking around the edges of the action while the men ru! sh through their latest murder case, joshing and winking in th! e kind o f male camaraderie the cop genre has celebrated for decades. When DCI Shefford dies of a sudden heart attack, Tennison demands to take over. Despite her superintendent's resistance ("Give her this case and she'll start expecting more."), she becomes the squad's first woman to head a murder investigation. Scrutinized at every moment by her superior officers, Tennison is faced with a case that spirals out from a single murder to a serial spree, a second-in-command who undermines her authority and her investigation at every turn, a team resistant to taking orders from a woman, and a private life unraveling due to her professional diligence. Lynda La Plant's script is a compelling thriller riddled with ambiguity that turns dead ends, blind alleys, and the mundane legwork of real-life cops into fascinating details. Mirren commands the role of Tennison with authority, intelligence, and a touch of overachieving desperation. Superb performances, excellent writing, and understated di! rection make this BBC miniseries one of the most involving mysteries in years. Look for future British stars Ralph Fiennes and Tom Wilkinson in supporting roles. --Sean AxmakerThis modern retelling of William Shakespeare's final masterpiece is an exciting, mystical and magical fantasy with Academy Award®-winner Helen Mirren (Best Actress, The Queen, 2006) leading a star-studded cast including Russell Brand (Get Him To The Greek) and Alfred Molina (The Sorcerer's Apprentice). Exiled to a magical island, the sorceress Prospera (Mirren) conjures up a storm that shipwrecks her enemies, and then unleashes her powers for revenge. Directed by the visionary Academy Award®-nominated Julie Taymor (Best Director, Frida, 2002) - and complete with exclusive bonus features - The Tempest, with its innovative twist, is a supernatural dramedy filled with Shakespearean villains, lovers and fools that will leave you spellbound.Stark colors and textures dominate The Tempest, a ! cinematic adaptation of the classic play by William Shakespear! e, direc ted by acclaimed theater maverick Julie Taymor (whose other films include Titus and Frida). The ever-magnificent Helen Mirren (The Queen, Red) plays the usually male role of the magician Prospera, the duchess of Milan, who was exiled to an island with her daughter Miranda (Felicity Jones), where she has two magical servants: the mercurial spirit Ariel (Ben Whishaw, Bright Star) and the sullen, lumpen Caliban (Djimon Hounsou, Blood Diamond). Prospera conjures up the storm of the title and brings ashore a ship full of her former peers, including the king of Naples (David Strathairn, Good Night, and Good Luck), the king's son Ferdinand (Reeve Carney), and Prospera's brother (Chris Cooper, Adaptation), who usurped her position in Milan. Treachery, regret, and romance follow. The Tempest has the weaknesses of the original play; there's much talk of rebellion but nothing really happens--Miranda and Ferdinand fall in lo! ve, Caliban gets drunk with a couple of clownish shipwrecked men (Alfred Molina, Spider-Man 2, and Russell Brand, Forgetting Sarah Marshall), and Ariel bewitches and bedazzles the king and his retinue… all of which comes to a tidy and too easy conclusion. Taymor whips up plenty of visual razzle-dazzle, some of which is lovely and some of which is trying too hard. But the strength of The Tempest is some gorgeous poetry, and Mirren handles that language with impeccable clarity and power. --Bret FetzerFILMS OF MICHAEL POWELL:AGE OF CONSEN - DVD Movie A true marvel, A Matter of Life and Death is one of the best films by the storied English filmmaking team known as the Archers: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Among other felicities, this 1946 fantasy has one of the most crackling opening ten minutes of any movie you'll ever see: after a deceptively dreamy prologue, we are thrown into the conversation between an airman (David Niven) who! se torched plane is about to crash in the English Channel, and! an Amer ican military radio operator (Kim Hunter) operating the radio on the ground. Their touching exchange, made urgent by his imminent death, is breathtakingly visualized (you have never seen a WWII plane interior quite as vividly as this). What follows is glorious: Niven's death has been missed by an otherworldly collector (Marius Goring)--all that thick English fog, you know--and so he gets to argue his case for life before a heavenly tribunal. The heaven sequences are in pearly black-and-white, the earthly material in stunning Technicolor (the color is the cause of a particularly good in-joke). The Powell-Pressburger brief on behalf of humanity is both romantic and witty, and the wonderful cast is especially enriched by Roger Livesey (the star of Powell and Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp), as a doctor with a camera obscura and an enormous heart.

Age of Consent, the other film in this two-disc set, comes from a much later period in Powell's ! career--indeed, close to the end of it. Made on a low budget in Australia in 1969, the movie depicts a disenchanted painter (James Mason) finding renewal in the isolation of an island and the beauty of the young woman (Helen Mirren) who models for him. The salt-and-pepper authority of Mason and the nubile freshness of Mirren give pleasure, although the theme is too on-the-nose (and Jack MacGowran's comic relief too broad) for a really subtle take on Powell's part. Extras include a seven-minute Martin Scorsese comment for AMOLAD, and a commentary track on that film by Powell-Pressburger authority Ian Christie; Scorsese chimes in again for Age of Consent, as does Helen Mirren, whose memories of her first movie are specific and fond. Kent Jones contributes the commentary track, a 10-minute interview with underwater photographers Ron and Valerie Taylor includes some Mirren comments, and a 16-minute making-of documentary gives some flavor of the set, including the ! memories of Powell's son Kevin. --Robert HortonHELEN MI! RREN AT THE BBC - DVD MovieLong before The Queen, long before Prime Suspect's DCI Tennyson, Helen Mirren was honing her craft with a cast of literary characters on par with the great actresses of all time--all in teleplays for the British Broadcasting System. This boxed set is both a treasure trove of English language classics, well known and obscure, and a brilliant window into the building of the talent and career of Mirren, starting as a young, Gwyneth Paltrowesque ingénue. The five discs feature costume dramas from just about any period of English history imaginable. Teleplays include versions of The Changeling, The Apple Cart, Caesar and Claretta , The Philanthropist, The Little Minister, Miss Rhinehart, Soft Targets, and other, shorter presentations.

Among the gems are The Changeling, shot with lush production values and a leisurely, very British pace. Mirren is Joanna, a young lass already torn by l! ove and commitment, and Mirren is riveting even as a cherubic youngster. ("I adore Jacobean tragedy," Mirren says of this play in the commentary--and who doesn't?) In Bernard Shaw's The Apple Cart Mirren doesn't appear until nearly an hour into the play, but is compelling as a wily mistress type: "You are as slippery as an eel," she tells her ne'er-do-well companion, "but you shall not slip through my fingers."

The set is as compelling for the appearances of other actors who costar with Mirren, including a young, tormented Ian Holm in Stephen Poliakoff's Soft Targets. Not to be missed are the interviews with Mirren, including Helen Mirren Remembers, which gives a great overview of the set, and how she grew into the splendid actress she later became. "You're going to be very exposed" in front of a camera, she says--and that's the true delight here for all Mirren fans. --A.T. Hurley