Drop us a line and tell us what piece of HMAS history we forgot to mention and we'll add it here.

It was with great sadness that we learned of the passing of Elaine Matlock, aka "Rainbow", after a prolonged illness. Elaine was a very generous contributor to and long-standing member of the group she helped form. Elaine had the great pleasure of meeting Helen on several occasions and was thrilled to see Helen receive the coveted Oscar. Elaine maintained a comprehensive library of HM video titles, hunting down lost treasures, sharing her collection with other members and reviewing movies, plays and television performances. Her reviews and ratings are preserved for posterity on this website.

Elaine made many friends with whom she shared her contagious enthusiasm and excitement about all things Helen.

LINDA ELAINE MATLOCK DEC. 26, 1950 - OCT. 9, 2007

Happy 10 years to the HMAS. To mark the occasion the website received substantial updates and the group's discussions were moved from a mailing list on Yahoogroups to a forum hosted here on this website.

Sam discovered that the BBC likes our website. :-)

Chris Hastings of the Sunday Telegraph phoned for a statement from the HMAS for an article on Helen's fantastic year and warm-up to the Oscar awards. Read the entire article, the HMAS paragraph is here:

Once again HMAS member Deb shows her support and passes on the best wishes of the Helen Mirren Appreciation Society. This time at the Las Vegas Film festival, where both Helen and Taylor received awards

At the San Francisco Film Festival HMAS member Deb delighted Helen and Taylor with a colorful banner. A Getty photographer was on hand to capture the event and the images were transmitted across the globe.

It was with great sadness that we learned of the sudden and untimely death of our friend and HMAS Founder Peter Wright. Peter created our group and welcomed each member with personal messages. He deflected the occasional "crazy" with tact and humor, he established a warm and respectful relationship between Helen Mirren and the HMAS, he supported the group's activities both financially and emotionally and he is greatly missed. Peter leaves his wife Christine and many many friends all over the world.

An interview by Ted Loos of the New York Times included this question:

Emma and her friend made a huge banner that said "Helen you rock!" and unfurled it at some point during either the curtain calls of Mourning Becomes Electra or the question-and-answer forum afterwards in New York.

Emma's account:

...curtain call happens...i stand up....nearly everyone in the stalls turned round and stared at me...i didnt care....ok so waiting there with lots of helen fans...by the exit of the car park ramp thing i see a car stop...someone gets out ...walking towards the group...no one else had seen her...i looked at this women then again and she did the classic helen lip thing and i knew straight away it was her...i walked up to her and asked her to sign my prime suspect book and she was like yeah course i will... and then helen goes:

"ive come to look for the banner girls"

we were like OMG thats us!! and she said " i thought you'd be waiting here and i wanted to come see you!) silent squeals... she then signed a photo i had and said: ohhhh i love this photo of me...where did you get it? I answered...she went and signed some more programmes but continued to talk to us...she said: "I can't believe the banner...its so cool... (helen used the word cool!) "helen you rock"...the whole cast were talking about it back stage they all saw it and thought it was so original" - we then gave her the banner and she opened it up and kept saying what a great idea it was and how thankful she was and then she said "right. as soon as i get home this is going above my bed!!"

And a follow-up the next night:

... there was question time...so i put my hand up to ask a question...this is where the fun started!!

me: how do you cope with fame and having such a large fan base?
HM: are you the "helen rocks" girls?
me: yes we are (squeals!!!)
HM: oh my god last night these two girls did the sweetest thing (helen then points to me and steph people turn around) last night i was feeling really shitty and at the curtain call i looked over and they had made this banner and held it up and it said "helen you rock" (lots of laughter)

Mailing list MirrenStuff established to handle photos and other large files. Internet bandwith and slow modem connections made it difficult for many members to handle the large volume of mail and large attachments. Conversely, many members wanted to exchange photos and news but weren't interested in the often off-topic discussions of the MirrenTalk list. Unfortunately, list discipline wasn't very good and people sent chit-chat to MirrenStuff and photos to MirrenTalk.

HMAS convention in Bath for Collected Stories. Several meetings with Helen during the week. Just before this photo was taken, Helen was standing at the top of a small flight of stairs. She agreed to a group photo and, full of fun, insisted that we all move around and gather at the foot of the stairs. She had a number of small tips to improve one's photogenic success, including this one "be sure to be photographed from above rather than below". (Clockwise from left: Jill, Nina, Peter, Ann, Helen, Anne Petree (?), Jette, Jen and Peter's wife Christine.)

A handful of members attended the premiere of Showtime's >The Passion of Ayn Rand" in Los Angeles, thanks to the cooperation of Tracy Wallace from the L.A. Family Center, the organisation that benefitted from the event and to which the HMAS made a small contribution.

Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 13:06:09 -0400
From: helen mirren
Subject: LA Premiere of "Passion of Ayn Rand"
To: Peter Wright ,

Dear Peter,

Thank you for your message. I guess you know by now that I could not attend the screening of Ayn Rand, as I was in Britain, but I understand it went well.

I am sorry to have missed the blessed hmas group. It would have been fun to see them in LA!

Hope you are well
With warm regards
Helen

Dear Helen,
Thank you so much for your lovely letter to the HMAS. We were all absolutely charmed by your sharing your thoughts with us so openly.

As you may have noticed from the lively representatives in London, the HMAS is full of original and enthusiastic fans, and your letter has prompted a great deal of discussion about ways to make your occasional visits to the web site fun and interesting.

Our main question is whether you are interested in receiving mail from us over the internet. f not, we'll gladly send you snail mail and welcome your hellos from cyberland. If you are open to hearing from us electronically, there are several easy ways to accomplish this. The easiest would be for us to write to you directly, but that would entail publishing your private email address to a rather large (and growing) group of people. I wouldn't want the volume of mail that might result to cause you any inconvenience. Here are some other options that would preserve the privacy of your address:

* Our messages could be left on a private message board for you to browse at your leisure. You'd be welcome to respond to our messages and post messages to the group.
* We could use the helenmirren@helenmirren.net mailbox to send letters to you. You could either read this mail as it arrives or ask one of us to screen it for you.
* I could compile greetings from the group and send you a periodic group-hello.

If any of these options interest you, please let us know. Thanks again for taking the time to say hello to us.

Best wishes,
Peter,
on behalf of your friends at the HMAS


On November 25, 1998, Helen Mirren replied to Peter's letter:

Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 09:05:32 -0500
From: HELEN L MIRREN
Subject: A question from the HMAS
Dear Peter,
Thank you for your letter. I joined your group really as a way to keep in touch with a great group of fans and let you know my plans as they came up. I don't particularly wish for people to contact me directly as it is very unlikely that I will ever reply. The best way you outline is definitely the third.

One of the small difficulties with being in the job I have is that you tend to be seen as the people you play and not as yourself, and therefore can become a repository for people's problems and dreams. However I do appreciate intelligent and realistic "fans" as I believe most of HMAS to be.

I send you my warm regards
Helen

Tickets for five days of Antony and Cleopatra previews. Weeks of planning. For some, brand new passports and worries about exchange rates and jet lag.

Fourteen of the original HMAS members met en masse in London, shared a small and slightly seedy hotel, compared notes about the play, and soaked up atmosphere. Besides being able to put faces to names, the highlight of the trip was undoubtedly the drinking of champagne with Helen in her dressing room after one of the preview performances.

In honor of Helen's birthday, the HMAS website was launched at this domain: www.helenmirren.net. A second domain, www.helenmirren.com, was also obtained, primarily to guard against misuse by commercial fan site services.

See the various layout changes over time at the Internet Archives "Wayback Machine" where old websites go to die.

Using the free service eGroups (later bought by Yahoo and changed to Yahoogroups), the HMAS set up two mailinglists MirrenNews and MirrenTalk. MirrenNews was designed for casual fans who only wanted to stay abreast of important Helen Mirren news and MirrenTalk was intended to facilitate informal discussions on a variety of more-or-less Helen Mirren related topics. MirrenNews was unfortunately neglected and although it still exists as of 2007 there is little if any activity. MirrenTalk, on the other hand, is one of Yahoogroups most prolific and long-lasting mailing lists.

Upon receiving Helen's approval and after a spirited debate, the name "The Helen Mirren Appreciation Society" was chosen. It was - and is - important to emphasize that this group is not a "Fan club" as such but rather an "Appreciation society" - the difference being a higher level of respect for Helen's privacy and the ability to keep separate the actress and the woman in the group's attitudes and behaviour.

The abbreviation HMAS is pronounced to great hilarity by most (including Helen) as "Ham-ass", although a few prefer "H-moss".

This is the first letter from Helen Mirren to Peter Wright.

Sent November 24, 1997 at 21:28:10 GMT
Dear Peter,
Thank you for your letter, and even more, thank you for your fan site on the World Wide W.

You certainly have my approval to form the official international fan club. I am very flattered, and delighted to have such discerning fans from all over the world. I hope that not all of you are fans just because of my TV series. I have decided to finish that particular series and launch off into something else, namely a new piece I have just completed in England for television called Painted Lady. Watch out for it, its fun! I play a washed up blues singer from the 70's who gets invoved in murder and general larceny.

The next piece I will do is a film for Showtime television called The Passion of Ayn Rand, in which I will play Ayn Rand herself.

With all good wishes to you all,
Helen Mirren

The kick-off letter by Peter Wright launching the Helen Mirren Discussion Group, forerunner of the Helen Mirren Appreciation Society

First Letter from Peter Wright
Subject: Mirren Discussion List
Date: Tue, 12 Aug 1997 16:25:49 +1000
From: Peter Wright [emails removed, many are out of date, ed.]
To: jetta@, Dianeh@, pi_indisguise@, mchughb@, Georgina36@, r.defrank@, ssheffie@, peterw@

Here it is... the first contribution to the Helen Mirren Discussion
List, where no topic is too controversial and irrational worship is encouraged. Let me
introduce the potential discussants:
Bren New Brunswick, Canada
Diane Austin, Texas
Georgina Providence, Rhode Island
Helene whereabouts unknown: Alberta, perhaps?
Peter Sydney, Australia
Rachel Denton, Texas
Sheila Tallahassee, Florida
Tracy Minneapolis/St Paul, Minnesota

whose email addresses are, respectively,
[emails removed, many are out of date, ed.]
---------------------------------------------------------
To start the ball rolling, I offer an answer (provided by a fan who is not in this group) to Georgina's question: "On page 135 of Amy Rennert's book it says '(remember her novel?)'. Does this mean that Helen Mirren has written a novel?" "Thank you for the updates. To answer the above question for you. Helen has always said she wished to write a novel. She made some half-hearted attempts when she was young. However, she gave up, thinking she didn't have what it took. In Rennert's book, this was mentioned along with the fact that Helen has always had an attachment to the city of Manchester, where the last Prime Suspect episode was filmed. So much so that, in her novel, her main character's name was to be Manchester."
---------------------------------------------------------
For your trivia collection, I'll sign off with: Did you know that HM's mother was a driving-license tester?

Cheers,
Peter :o)