Helen Mirren: dame, queen and rebel

Bardot and Deneuve, Adjani and Beart, Audrey Tautou and Virginie Ledoyen.......the list could go on. French actresses have long been credited with special powers to enthrall and excite English speaking cinema goers.

Even Beatrice Dalle, who has hardly (I nearly said barely) done anything memorable since Betty Blue, managed to grab a few headlines when, in the latest chapter of her offbeat life, she married a French villain in jail.

But the fascination works both ways.

Interviews with American, British and other Anglophone actresses seem to be must-haves for the French glossy magazines and newspapers.

All the better, for audiences in France, if there is a certain Frenchness about the leading lady in the spotlight.

Jodie Foster, for example, because she was educated at a lycee in California.

Helena Bonham Carter, Charlotte Rampling, Kristin Scott Thomas and Emma Thompson because they all speak such good French. Jane Birkin because she doesn't - or, at any rate, because she clings to the extravagant English accent and schoolgirlish constructions that so charm the French (while actually being able to speak the language flawlessly, according to my spies).

Rampling turned 60 this year. Birkin reaches the milestone in December. And the flavour of the month is another sixtysomething.

Step forward Dame Helen Mirren.

Eight million viewers apparently watched the concluding episode of her last (last ever, or last for now?) appearance as Detective Superintendent Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect.

It was a majestic performance, full of tension and humanity, and probably needed to be in order to rise above a plot full of implausible twists.

But the French are not raving about Mirren's portrayal of an alcoholic cop's final case.

They have another, even more majestic role in mind - her incarnation of The Queen in Stephen Frears's excellent new film about the days that followed the death in Paris of Diana, Princess of Wales.

"Amazing". "Utterly royal". "Incredible". "Mesmerising". From Le Monde and Le Figaro Magazine to the online Absolu Feminin, the plaudits have been truly impressive.

And rightly so. Mirren not only manages to look the part but draws on her matchless technique to capture all that we know, and much more that we believe, about the monarch.

She is certainly helped in her endeavours by the strength of the supporting cast. Mark Bazeley gets Alastair Campbell to a slightly thuggish perfection, James Cromwell - an American for heaven's sake - is splendid as a curmudgeonly and harrumphing Prince Philip.

But it is Mirren who beyond question steals the show. All the more disappointing, then, that box office figures in France have so far fallen way short of The Queen's very successful start in Britain.

Perhaps the French need to be reassured that while the lady may be a dame and be happy to play a queen, she is no royalist.

Once they realise that she shares their republican instincts and has always been seen as something of a rebel, they will surely flock to their nearest salle de cinema multiplex.