Seeing Dame Helen Mirren with King Charles at the Royal Garden Party reminded me that I was "introduced" to the celebrated actress, who is now 80, via movie puzzle-master Peter Greenaway's beautiful, bawdy and brutal The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989) -- a film that's quite a mouthful, in more ways than one.
Mirren plays the titular wife to Michael Gambon's Thief, a bitterly boorish and brutish man who is a nightly patron of what must be the most remarkable restaurant in England, where the Lover, the proprietor of a bookstore, is also a frequent diner.
Because the Cook and his crew secretly despise the Thief, they help the Wife and her bookish Lover (Alan Howard) "get busy" in various spots and at various times during the Thief's interminable dinners.
As the Fates would have it, the Lovers are eventually discovered. The Thief's thugs torture the bookish Lover in a horrible and grossly poetic fashion. The Wife, enraged by the death of her Lover, works with the Cook (Richard Bohringer) and his crew to avenge the Lover's death in the most "delectable" way imaginable, putting an end to the Thief's reign of terror.
It's a tour de force that is not to everyone's taste, but was a wonderful "howdy do" to Helen Mirren, whose work never fails to fascinate. She won an Oscar for playing Charles' Mum in The Queen in 2006.
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