A retired bus driver steals a painting to finance a charity giving free TV licences to pensioners. It's hard to imagine that would work as a movie pitch - unless of course it actually happened. The true story of would-be art thief Kempton Bunton has been turned into a movie by Notting Hill director Roger Michell, and it’s due for release later this month. The Duke stars Jim Broadbent as Bunton and Helen Mirren as his wife, Dorothy, who kept the family afloat while her husband acted out some of his crazier ideas. The title of the movie comes from Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington which was stolen from London’s National Gallery in 1961. Helen Mirren spoke to Oliver Callan on The Ryan Tubridy Show about playing Dorothy Bunton, her fondness for the film's director Roger Michell, who died suddenly last year and her memories of shooting John Boorman's medieval fantasy Excalibur in Ireland in 1981.

Mirren confesses to having no interest in following the news when she was in her early 20’s, so the story of the 1961 art theft passed her by. When she was offered the script of The Duke, she says she couldn’t believe it was based on a true story:

"When I read the script I thought did this really happen? I Googled it and I went, oh my God, yes, this did really happen! And I think it’s very important for the film that it did really happen, because if it was just an invented, you know, silly caper, it just wouldn’t have the kind of depth that the film has."

Mirren is kind to the subject of the movie, Kempton Bunton, describing him to Oliver Callan as a man whose great passion and intelligence were unmatched by power and influence in British society:

"He was a man who was very intelligent, very creative, but living in an economically deprived area of London in the early 60’s, working class, so he had no outlet for his inventiveness, his intelligence, his political convictions."

In post-World War II Britain, many older people who had survived the war were struggling. This fired up Kempton Bunton’s sense of justice, particularly when it came to demands that pensioners pay for their TV licence:

"He’s obsessed with the fact that old age pensioners have to pay the licence to get the BBC, because he thinks this is unfair - people have just been at war. It’s not long after the end of the second World War, and why should people who fought in the war now have to pay a licence to watch television? As we say in England, he got his knickers in a twist about this."

Kempton was married with five children. He had retired early and spent most of his time pursuing his political ideals, Helen says. She says Dorothy Bunton bore most of the burden of supporting the family and supporting her husband as he pursued his latest campaigns. When the Goya painting was stolen from the National Gallery, only to turn up four years later, the media focused almost exclusively on Kempton, leaving almost no material on Dorothy for an actor to draw upon:

"All the attention went on Kempton and the family were very much in the background. I saw a photograph of Dorothy, that was all and I didn’t really base my look on that photograph. The Dorothy I play really came off the script, it was in the writing. I just looked at the writing and took her from there. There was a truth , in the sense that Dorothy was the person holding the family together."

Helen Mirren says that playing the role of Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen (2006) didn't feel all that different to playing the long-suffering wife of Kempton Bunton:

"Playing The Queen and playing Dorothy: they're not that far apart. They’ve different costumes and different accents and a different look. But there is a similarity between them. Dorothy is a queen of her own little kingdom. "

Oliver picked up on a line in the movie, where Jim Broadbent’s character refers to his wife as his "Irish Rose". Mirren says she wasn’t aware of any Irish connection in the story, but the poverty in the north of England in the early 1960’s reminded her of conditions in Dublin in the early 1980’s, which she observed while filming John Boorman’s Excalibur:

"I saw kids without shoes in Dublin at that time. There was incredible poverty in Dublin in that era and that sort of poverty which I hadn’t really witnessed before coming from, you know, I didn’t grow up in a wealthy family, far from it. I remember my mum looking in her purse at the end of the week trying to find enough money to buy food and we didn’t have central heating or washing machines or television or anything like that or cars or anything, but that kind of poverty I had never seen before, that I saw in Dublin. And that was the kind of poverty I think you could see in northern towns in Britain at that time."

Helen Mirren says she was deeply affected by the sudden loss of the director of The Duke, who died unexpectedly just weeks after attending the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado in September 2021, where the movie was well received:

"We were all absolutely devastated, because the tone of the film, the sweetness of the film, the funniness of the film, the heart of the film very much came from Roger, from our director. He was our leader in every way, it was devastating to lose him. But in his canon of work, Roger’s canon, I think for The Duke to be his last film is lovely, because it’s such a lovely film. It has such great heart; it’s so beautifully realised by Roger. It has all the lightness of touch that made him into a great film director."

You can listen back to Helen Mirren’s conversation with Oliver Callan in full here and The Duke opens in cinemas in Ireland on the 25th of February.