Helen Mirren explains why calling a woman 'sassy' is just plain 'insulting'

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

Helen Mirren has called for new words to define female humour and power, because she believes branding a woman “sassy” is “insulting”.

The actress also told The Times that she also detested being described as taking on “feisty” roles.

“Only women are feisty,” she said. “It just makes me gag.”

“We need new words for female power and funniness and smartness.”

She went on to label the Seventies a worse era for women than “the f**king Forties and Fifties”.

“I was thinking about the Seventies which, unfortunately, was when I was at my prime, age-wise. Men saw that [era] as a sort of, ‘Oh fantastic. We can f**k anything, however we like, whenever we like! They’re up for grabs, boys!’ It was that kind of attitude.”

Mirren added that the “level of cruelty and judgementalism” of women towards other women, particularly in the age of social media, is more damaging “than from men to women nowadays”.

Mirren spoke ahead of the release of Woman In Gold, a biopic about one Jewish refugee’s struggle to reclaim Gustav Klimt's painting The Lady in Gold, stolen from her family by the Nazis during the Second World War, from the Austrian government.