Why Helen Mirren’s Catherine the Great is a sexual revolutionary

The majestic Helen Mirren is showcasing how much more straightforward it is for a woman to play at being royal than it is to marry into royalty.

Even better, by playing, at the age of 74, the title role of HBO’s Catherine the Great, Mirren is portraying a woman “half her age”, while simultaneously reminding the world that many women actually like sex. And continue to do so as long as men do. Shocker.

We have grown so used to wrinkly old men being found fabulously attractive by young women on screen that we even have a term for it: the Woody Allen syndrome. Yet Mirren, who literally pants for her key ally, Grigory Potemkin, on screen, is very unusual – I can’t think of any other female septuagenarians showing flesh on screen (unless they are playing a corpse).

That Mirren is a generation older than the 50-year-old Jason Clarke, who plays Potemkin, is one thing, but the fact that she genuinely seems to be wanting – nay craving – post-menopausal sex is the real surprise.

It is unprecedented and has drawn comparisons from some reviewers with other TV hits that subvert sexual power play – the lesbian love triangle in The Favourite, for instance, or Gentleman Jack.

The power shift of Catherine the Great comes because she was a monarch. There still aren’t quite as many of those who are women as there are men, but maybe, as the stories we see on screen become more diverse, we will see many more brilliant older women playing romantic roles against younger men. Then we can call it the Helen Mirren syndrome.