Helen Mirren won the award for Best Actress at the glittering BAFTA awards ceremony last night. She beat off fierce competition from Oscar rivals Kate Winslet and Judi Dench.

Following the recent Golden Globe prize for her stunningly sympathetic performance in The Queen, a film covering the immediate aftermath of the death of Princess Diana, Dame Helen is now runaway favourite to win the Oscar for Best Actress. She has been nominated along with fellow British actresses, Judi Dench and Kate Winslet.

This really is a golden period for British actors. The three who go forward for this year’s Oscars all give superb accounts of difficult roles in their respective movies. Any one could win with distinction.

However, all eyes are on Dame Helen, whose portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II has already become a classic that has redefined public attitudes to a once beleaguered Queen.

The film was meant to do a hatchet job on the Monarchy, but writer and director hadn’t factored in the Mirren contribution. The Queen herself has never been more popular, except in her early “salad days” when few could match her for looks.

A film that changes the course of history, or how an historical event is seen, is a rare occurrence. The Queen is just that.

Celebrity can sometimes work for the better, instead of leaving the usual trashy trail behind it.

There’s a review of Mediated: How the Media Shape Your World by Thomas de Zengotita over on Syntagma.

“This is a scintillating, exhilarating ride of a book. If you’re interested in blogging, or any aspect of the media, new or mainstream, you shouldn’t miss it. The author is an academic in New York with a PhD in anthropology. He began his career as a Method actor.”

The death of Princess Diana, with its worldwide Mexican wave of shock, was a typical example of this phenomenon in action. So was the very recent hubbub over the grisly end of the croc-baiter, Steve Irwin. These are not rational reactions. They show us as mediated characters, receiving our grief second-hand.

The world and life as a performance has become the norm. We are now used to seeing everything through the lenses of others. We’ve become part of a World Mind, instead of using our own. In the face of this, what can be done?

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Michael Caine by Steve Newman

Michael Caine comes in for a bit of stick at times, and usually because he’s made one or two ropey films where he’s the only asset and the money was good. But not always. He’ll often defer his fee, or take a chance on a percentage if it means a film project he likes the look of gets made. You only have to think of the stunning Little Voice to get the point. But it wasn’t always like that.

Between 1956 and 1963, the year he came to fame in Zulu, Michael Caine made 125 TV appearances, which included several in Dixon of Dock Green - invariably as a young crook - plus Knight Errant and William Tell (remember those?), where he played rebellious peasants.

During the same period he also appeared in over 30 films, invariably uncredited, as in the 1956 Sailor Beware, starring Peggy Mount, although, in the same year he did manage to land the much more substantial part of Private Lockyer in Julian Amyes’ hard hitting 1956 war film A Hill in Korea, which featured George Baker, and a certain Stanley Baker, who of course went on to co-produce and star in Zulu.

After that it was back to uncredited stuff for Caine, most notably in Lewis Gilbert’s 1958 Carve Her Name with Pride, a very moving piece of work starring Virginia McKenna, where Caine can be spotted, very briefly, in the back of a truck.

In the early 1960s Caine appeared in several of the hugely popular Edgar Wallace Mysteries, a series of British B movies that was staple acting fare for such as Bernard Lee, Sam Kydd, Patrick Cargill, Patrick Barr, Lee Montague, Harry H.Corbett, Paul Daneman, Nigel Green, and Patrick Magee - with those last three also creating very memorable parts for themselves in Zulu.

For Caine the Edgar Wallace series was an excellent training ground where he was able to mix with some of Britain’s most popular film actors of the day, and a few writers and directors of note too, namely Gerard Glaister who later went on to direct the BBC TV series Howards’ Way; and writer Philip Mackie, who is now probably best remembered for his script of The Naked Civil Servant.

Then came something of a breakthrough when Caine was cast in a television play as William Hall describes in his biography of the actor, Arise, Sir Michael Caine…

“It was a ‘two-hander’ by Johnny Speight called The Compartment, and was screened on BBC TV on 22 August 1961. Caine, in suede jacket, black shirt and light coloured slacks, without glasses, played a loquacious youth trying to engage a stuffy businessman (Frank Finlay) in friendly conversation before producing a gun. The BBC referred to it as a ‘gentle comedy’. Caine, typically concise, sums up his part thus: ‘I did a forty-five minute monologue about a guy who goes nuts on a train trying to talk to a very posh businessman.’

“The play received good notices. But more important, in the next post Michael received a letter from Dennis Selinger suggesting an appointment.”

Selinger was then as now, one of the UK’s top agents, and, after seeing Caine in the Speight play wrote to the actor telling him how much he’d enjoyed his performance and that if he wasn’t already signed-up he’d like to represent him. Caine - along with Sean Connery and Roger Moore - has been one of Selinger’s top clients ever since.

And it was after Selinger signed him that Caine was cast in Dixon of Dock Green, and then in the failing ATV series Mark Saber (which featured Honor Blackman and that old matinee idol, Donald Gray) where he played another young rogue.

In 1961 Caine was cast as a policeman (again uncredited) in veteran director Val Guest’s very influential British movie The Day the Earth Caught Fire, starring an old friend of Caine’s, Edward Judd. This was followed by another uncredited part (his last) in The Wrong Arm of the Law, which I think was Peter Sellers first venture into films.

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