COMMAND PERFORMANCE.

If you go east on Sunset Boulevard and take a left onto one of those burned-out stretches of arterial road which cut across the main drag like stitches on a baseball, you pass laundromats, motels, gas stations, pawnshops, and burger stands, until the road abruptly dead-ends at the base of the foothills beside Runyon Canyon. Towering bamboo plants block any glimpse of what lies up above. To the side are the gates of a private road, a terrace hidden behind palm fronds and hibiscus. This vertiginous landscape is one of the places that the actress Helen Mirren calls home. To enter her driveway is like going from black-and-white to Technicolor.

Since she decamped from Britain to Los Angeles, in 1984, Mirren has spent much of her time living on these fecund six acres with her husband, the director Taylor Hackford ("An Officer and a Gentleman," "Dolores Claiborne," "Ray"). (They also have homes in London, Provence, and New York.) Mirren claims to have got Hackford interested in horticulture, but it's forestry, more like. She gardens; he plants trees. Their driveway switchbacks up a steep incline--past Mexican palms, Italian cypresses, birds-of-paradise, jacaranda, oleander, carob, coral, eucalyptus, and Chinese lantern trees--to a clearing in front of a cream-colored Monterey Spanish-style house with faded green shutters, a shake roof, and wrought-iron balconies overhanging a veranda, which looks down onto a long aquamarine pool. Built in 1929 by the silent-screen star Dustin Farnum, the house exudes the patrician restraint of Old Hollywood--a regal indifference to the city, which can't be seen or heard, just a few hundred yards below. The isolation of the place satisfies what the sixty-one-year-old Mirren calls her "appetite for solitude"; its scenic grandeur suggests her public stature. Much of what dazzles the eye has come into full bloom in the last fifteen years. So has Mirren's career.

Until the first season of the ground-breaking television series "Prime Suspect" aired, in 1991, Mirren, even in her best films--"The Long Good Friday," "Cal," "The Mosquito Coast," "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover"--was always to be found on the edges of the story. "I used to feel like a racehorse pulling a cart in some of those roles," she said. Since the success of "Prime Suspect"--"the most sustained example of great acting in the history of television," Esquire called it--she has driven the narratives. In the last eight years, on the main stages of London and New York, Mirren, who was made Dame Helen in 2003, has played the long-suffering Lady Torrance in Tennessee Williams's "Orpheus Descending," the trapped Alice in Strindberg's "Dance of Death," the villainous Christine in Eugene O'Neill's "Mourning Becomes Electra," and, for the third time in her career, the rapacious Cleopatra in Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra." This fall, two more virtuoso exhibitions of her work will reach the public. On PBS, in the seventh and final season of "Prime Suspect," Mirren's steely and vulnerable Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison will fight one last battle against the London police force's patriarchal attitudes, against criminals, and against her own flawed nature. And Mirren's depiction of Queen Elizabeth II, in Stephen Frears's "The Queen," a deft exploration of the politics of sovereignty and the Royal Family's reaction to the death of Princess Diana, will open the New York Film Festival this week.

Although there is nothing remotely grand about Mirren in person--she is lively and low-key--she is clearly comfortable with herself, and that strength of character translates easily to performances of the formidable. "Probably no other actress can let you know as fast and economically as she can that she's playing a distinguished and important woman," Pauline Kael wrote of Mirren, in an otherwise unenthusiastic review of "White Nights" (1985). "Even as a teen-ager, she had a thing about regality," the actor Kenneth Cranham, whom Mirren calls her "first proper boyfriend," said. "She's always had that hauteur. It was that thing of being apart and having poise and taking it all in." "I don't mind if I don't have any lines as long as I get to wear a crown," Mirren once quipped. Her debut with the National Youth Theatre, at the age of nineteen, was as the Queen of Egypt in "Antony and Cleopatra." Over the years since then, her royals have gone from the ridiculous--in the unwatchable soft-porn "Caligula" (1979), a film that won her no glory but provided a down payment on her first home--to the remarkable, her Queen Charlotte in "The Madness of King George" (1994), for instance, a performance for which she earned an Academy Award nomination. Last year, she gave a thrilling, Emmy-winning performance as the title character in the British television miniseries "Elizabeth I." In "The Queen," she undergoes an even more extraordinary transformation. "It may well be that this was the part she was waiting for in some unspoken way," Frears said. "She's bright. She's confident. She's open and honest. So she is in herself challenging," he added. "It seemed essential to cast somebody who made you nervous."

As the current monarch, Mirren delivers an inspired study of royal restraint, which rescues the Queen from both satire and sentimentality. "I cried when I did my costume fitting," Mirren said. "I saw the shoes lined up and the tweed skirts and the sweaters. I said, 'I can't do this.' But I grew to love it." Mirren, who argues that "you have to allow yourself to grow older in front of the camera--you have to not fight it," continued, "Her complete lack of vanity was a comfortable place to be as a woman. You're not striving to look pretty or beautiful or slim. You're 'I'm me. This is me.' It's a mark of a huge ego." As she was speaking about the role, she suddenly stopped and held her hands up in front of her face. "I went like this before I did a take," she said, pulling her palms slowly toward the back of her head, then suddenly swivelling her wrists and thrusting her hands forward, like beams of light, beside her eyes. "She's way back inside herself," ...