Mirren...Taymor...Tempest

It was right around the end of the year this time when I got to chat up Helen Mirren about her all star performance in..."National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets."

OK, so maybe "chat up" isn't what you do when you talk to Ms Mirren. And "all star" might be a bit lauditory of a performance that _ while perfectly serviceable given the giver _ was still, I suspect, cashing a paycheck. And probably a fairly nice one.

Nonetheless, I'm not about to quibble. I got to meet Dame Helen, player of all Queens. She was, as you might suspect her to be, quite a cool Dame, and she talked about playing a brothel keeper in the upcoming film "Love Ranch," the first with her director/husband Taylor Hackford since the two met during the filming of "White Nights" in 1985.

She told me she expected to be back on the London stage by late in the year 2008. Well, 2008 is winding down, and there doesn't appear to be any stage engagement _ across the Pond or otherwise _featuring Helen Mirren. (She is a regular stage returnee, though, so I'd expect something.)

I don't remember how the conversation got around to performing while ill, or finding super-human strength to do stunts or something like that. Mirren chalked up said resources to the magic of being in the moment.

"You can arrive at the theater just feeling like death warmed up and you walk on stage and you just fly through the performance," she told me. "Then the performance ends and you immediately feel like death warmed up again. For those moments on stage something happens."

I bring up Helen Mirren, who isn't in any movie, play or infomercial that I know of at the moment, because Julie Taymor is fleshing out the casting of her film of "The Tempest" which will have Mirren playing Propsera, the deposed Duchess of Milan who brings his enemies to a magical island and teaches them an equally magical lesson.

Prospero is usually, but not always, played by a man. It's kind of interesting that Taymor's got Jeremy Irons _ who will be a fantastic Prospero someday _ to play P.'s brother Antonio. The starry casting gets intriguing the further you go down the list: Djimon Hounsou as the monster, Caliban, Alfred Molina and Russell Brand as the drunken clowns Stephano and Trinculo, Ben Wishaw as the spirit, Ariel, Felicity Jones as Propsero(a)'s daughter, Miranda and maybe Geoffrey Rush as faithful servant Gonzalo.

Should be quite a show. Movie-goers may have Taymor's Beatles music love story "Across the Universe" more recently in mind, but the stage and opera director also crafted a pretty cool film version of the Bard's "Titus Andronicus."

This film also probably guarantees that plans for, ahem! "Spider-Man: the Musical" to which Taymor has long been attached, has to cool its webs a bit longer. Either that or it will move forward with a different helmsman.