As if we needed more reasons to love Helen Mirren. In the latest example of a favoured genre of story – Hollywood stars turning up in random UK places (see also: Nicolas Cage spending New Year’s Eve in a Somerset pub), Mirren has been delighting fans with her Instagram posts detailing her jaunts around Bradford.
Mirren, along with Jim Broadbent, is in Bradford filming her upcoming film The Duke, the true story of an art heist. And it seems the actor has really taken to the West Yorkshire city and all it has to offer.
Mirren started her documentation with a night-time snap of one of the city’s mills with the caption: “The one and only Bradford with its own magic.”
The next day, she upped her game. “Last night at The Panto Snow White in the magnificent Alhambra Theater in Bradford I yelled ‘he’s behind you’ and wearing my lit up blue tiara and laughed my socks off at 2 legends Billy Pearce and Paul Chuckle. It was an honour to meet them afterwards. Thank you, you guys are truely [sic] awesome.”
Clearly having the time of her life, Mirren next snapped her dinner, giving a shoutout to a local restaurant. “Nothing like indian/pakistani dinner in Bradford doesn’t get any better, Thank you Mumtaz.”
But perhaps Mirren’s most joyous post of all was a wonderful picture of four friends dressed up in leg warmers and shell suits, complete with crimped hair and retro shades.
“Some gals having a great eighties night out in Bradford,” Mirren wrote.
Imagine being approached by Helen Mirren wanting to photograph you in your fancy dress finery.
Mirren’s Yorkshire posts have proved extremely popular, with tens of thousands of likes. In particular, there is something very sweet about her namechecking Bradford in each post, lest we think she is back in Los Angeles at the Golden Globes, where she was just a week ago. Incidentally, here’s her last (pre-Bradford) post from New York:
As witnessed by the fact other recent posts include a cheese sarnie as her “favourite supper”, and the following post in which she eats chips from a cone, handbag discarded next to her, the Oscar-winner has always been refreshingly down to earth.
Basically, what I’m saying is: Bradford, give her the Freedom of the City. Or even better: make her mayor.
