- - Helen Mirren Reflects on Her Dad Changing the Family's Russian Last Name to ‘Assimilate’ in England (Exclusive)

Eric AnderssonAugust 24, 2025 at 10:00 PM

Helen Mirren's father changed the family's Russian last name when she was a young girl growing up in England

"One minute I was called Mironov, and then, Mirren,” the actress tells PEOPLE

Her father, who was born in Russia, wanted to "assimilate" in his adopted country, says Mirren

Helen Mirren is looking back at her father’s decision to change the family name when she was a young girl.

“One minute I was called Mironov, and then, Mirren,” the actress, now 80, tells PEOPLE.

Her father, Vasiliy Mironov, a native of Russia who moved with his family to England as a boy, made the decision in order to fit in, explains Mirren, who was one of three children raised by her dad and mom Kathleen, a U.K, native.

“The reason for it was that he wanted to assimilate,” explains the Thursday Murder Club actress. “Britain is a much more multicultural place than it was when I was a small child. It was a pretty monoculture sort of place with very few foreign names.”

Maarten de Boer

Helen Mirren

Her father was, as she wrote in her 2011 memoir In the Frame: My Life in Words and Pictures, the “young scion of an illustrious Russian family.”

Indeed, Mirren’s grandfather, Pyotor Vassili Mironov, was a member of the country’s military class when Russia was still ruled by a czar in the early 20th century.

After serving in the Russo-Japanese war, Pyotor climbed the ranks of the military and was temporarily living in England, where he and his family were “honoured guests of the British government, living in luxurious quarters within the Russian embassy,” Mirren continued in her book.

But after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 — which ended the Romanov dynasty and czarist rule — the Mironovs were “stranded” in England, according to a 2006 article in The New Yorker. “[Pyotor] lost his homeland, his pedigree, and his estate, Kuryanov—fifteen hundred acres.”

Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty

Helen Mirren on Aug. 14, 2025

With “no means of support,” according to Mirren, Pyotor became a taxi driver, and later, so did Mirren’s father.

Though he had spent many years in England since he was a child, Mirren’s father never felt like he quite fit in, the actress wrote.

“As an émigré with a strange name, I think he always felt an outsider, uncomfortable in a country that was at that time very homogeneous,” she wrote, adding that he eventually “dropped the foreign Mironov for the more acceptable though falsely Scottish Mirren.” Vasiliy also went by the more anglicized Basil for a first name.

The changes, however, didn't seem to affect Mirren too much: "Honestly, I don't remember much of that."

Maarten de Boer

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”