John Leonard:
"....On American TV, when a woman smokes at all, she's bad, unless she's also working-class and therefore stupid.... But on American TV, whether or not she smokes, no woman older than Lolita is allowed to carry a mini-series, either, unless she's also a glamour puss. At Granada in England, they'd rather have someone who can act. Mirren, a veteran of the Royal Shakespeare Company who made her first movie with James Mason in 1969 and has appeared on the stage in plays by everybody from Shakespeare to Chekov to David Hare, is not a glamour puss. What she is is splendid....
"In fact, Jane does neglect the hearth and any other sort of healthy emotional life outside her work, which is why she herself is a prime suspect in the eyes of all the men around her. But the marvel of Prime Suspect is that this difficult woman is permitted to find her satisfaction in a difficult job...."
[left out some]
New York, January 27, 1992
"For adulthood's paw prints, we can look to Helen Mirren, who returns as Jane Tennison of Scotland Yard in Prime Suspect 2.... Mirren once again is a listening intelligence. Her brain's an ear. Really, television doesn't get any better."
New York, February 15, 1993
David Denby:
".... Mirren has brought off the most sustained example of great acting in the history of television.... Mirren remains naked throughout Prime Suspect without removing a single garment. No matter how many squalid crises are forming, no matter how many people are fighting for her attention, Mirren always has a private moment with the camera, a moment in which we see, beneath the harassed, brisk manner, exactly what she's thinking and feeling. She sets the emotional and moral values. And we accept what we learn from her because she's always a three-dimensional person, hurt and hurting, strong yet easily angered. Maturity has never looked so ripe, so sexual-- and so intellectually focussed at the same time. Mirren has ended, for the time being, the tedious, pointless distinction between mind and body. She's put a whole woman on the screen and made people grateful just for her existence."
Esquire, 1994
(quoted by Anthony Slide in Some Joe You Don't Know: An American Biographical Guide to 100 British...
James Wolcott:
"A performance as thorny and propulsive as Helen Mirren's in the Prime Suspect series has a crackle that holds up in reruns; her trim execution recalls the Humphrey Bogart of The Maltese FalconandThe Big Sleep."
"....The heiress to Glenda Jackson as the queen of the quality miniseries...."
New Yorker, January 25, 1993
See also Amy Taubin, Village Voice, January 28, 1992
David Ansen, Newsweek, May 16, 1994
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