Helen Mirren recalls the 'Frenzy' of auditioning as a young actress for the real 'Hitchcock' Oscar winner plays his wife in a 'Psycho' drama starring Anthony Hopkins as the famed film director BY ETHAN SACKS / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Helen Mirren: 'I didn't like Hitchcock very much [in 1972], and he didn't like me very much either.'

It’s no mystery what drove Helen Mirren to star in “Hitchcock.”

Long before she was an Academy Award winner (for 2006’s “The Queen”) and a Dame, Mirren was a young stage actress in London auditioning for the real Master of Suspense as he was preparing to shoot his second-to-last film, “Frenzy,” back in 1972.

“I didn’t like Hitchcock very much, and he didn’t like me very much either,” Mirren tells the News. “It was not a good meeting at all. I guess it was a kind of audition, but I didn’t really want to be in the movie.

“I had no appreciation of who Alfred Hitchcock was. He was just an old-fashioned guy making old-fashioned movies, as far as I was concerned. I was ignorant and prejudiced.”

Forty years later, Mirren had the chance to correct an impetuousness of youth — if not to work with Hitchcock directly, then get to do the next best thing.

In “Hitchcock,” opening today, the 67-year-old actress stars as Alma Reville, the wife, frequent editor and moral compass of the legendary filmmaker.

Based on Stephen Rebello’s nonfiction book “Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of ‘Psycho,’” the tongue-in-cheek drama focuses on the couple’s uphill battle to film what would become the director’s signature hit. The movie also chronicles how they struggled to keep their marriage together in the process.

History has proven 1960’s “Psycho” to be Hitchcock’s most successful work and a genre-sparking thriller. But Alfred and Alma risked losing their home to finance it themselves. Getting the project through the censors and the studio, Universal, was murder.


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