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Helen Mirren says that voting for herself in this year's Oscars race was harder than anything she had to do while making The Queen.
The 61-year-old British veteran, favourite to scoop the best actress Oscar at Hollywood's big night on February 25, said she had thought twice about ticking her own name on the Academy Awards ballot papers.
"It's an awful moral dilemma," Mirren said. "You think, 'I can't possibly vote for myself.' But then you start thinking 'Maybe it will be the one vote that makes the difference.' Asked if she had indeed voted for herself, Mirren went coy. "I'm not telling you," she said, before adding: "Anyway, you know what I did."
The actress, who has been nominated for Oscars twice before, in 1995 for The Madness of King George and in 2002 for Gosford Park, said she never took Oscar nominations for granted.
"It's a bit like looking at the Matterhorn. You gaze up at the summit and say, 'Isn't it beautiful - but I'm never going to get there."'
Mirren, who is on course for a clean sweep of this season's awards after picking up gongs from the Screen Actors Guild and Golden Globes, said: "I'll have a loop made of all my acceptance speeches, and every visitor will be forced to spend 10 minutes watching it."
