Part two of my coffee and conversation with Helen Mirren about the Queen and "The Queen"

As the launch of the 6th season of "The Crown" approaches in less than three weeks, some candid observations from the actress who defined Elizabeth II's cinematic presence in the Oscar-winning film

Helen Mirren, a full-fledged “Queenist,” greets Elizabeth II at a Buckingham Palace reception in May 2011..

In September 2009, sitting side by side on a sofa in the living room of my Washington, D.C. apartment, Dame Helen Mirren and I drank coffee as she lifted the curtain on her iconic performance as Queen Elizabeth II in “The Queen” three years earlier. Last week I described how we met and how she prepared for her role. This week I’ll dig into her equally thorough involvement in the filming itself.

“You called yourself a `Queenist,’” I ventured, remembering a line in an email she had sent me the previous year. “It was a phrase Stephen Frears [ the director of “The Queen”] coined,” she said.  “My parents were rabid anti-monarchists, but they respected the Queen on a human level. My respect for the Queen and how I played her was purely human. This is a human being, and this is what she did. It has nothing to do with the monarchy and the class system.”

I never really looked at her

She said that Stephen Frears described the Queen as “the one absolute constant in his life, and I feel the same way. She was there when I was born in 1945, and she has been there as an icon and an image, but I never really looked at her.”

She admitted that “once I got into it, I started loving her. You can’t help it….