Helen Mirren thinks she's just a point on a spectrum.

[Lamahaha]

www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-7522349/Dame-Helen-Mirren-reveals-doesnt-believe-binary-sexuality.html

Why do celebrities think their opinion is in any way valid, just because they're famous? Why do people bother to listen to them and write articles about their beliefs?

Oh and an old friend is a chemist - last time I saw her she had burned her eyebrows off by accident...

"Common sense is not so common."

My dear child has a stupidly high iq but the common sense of a wombat.

i used to work with hundreds of research scientists - brains the size of planets, but a lot of them shouldn't be let out without a nanny.

I worked in the City with some chaps in pretty high falutin’ positions and I used wonder how they managed to find their way to work in the morning.

What bollox. I'm disappointed in Helen Mirren. I supposed she was asked questions and had to say something.

She is someone whose 'womanliness' was celebrated too, more than most!

At least they explained that the T word is without the words ‘evil bitches who should burned’

Helen Mirren won a BEST ACTRESS Oscar playing the QUEEN and got a DAMEHOOD for it.

She'd be the first person to object if the Academy Awards became gender neutral - would she have beaten Forrest Whittaker, Leonardo Dicaprio, Peter O'Toole and Will Smith that year?

Would she mind losing out to Ian McKellen or Daniel Day Lewis if they got cast as the Queen or Catherine the Great? Would Jane Tennyson have been a breakthrough star-making role if it was 'John'.

And if people called her Sir... I don't think so.

She knows exactly what a man and a woman is. She is just in the business of cultivating her 'outrageous but woke old lady down with the kids' persona.

I suspect Joan Collins would call bullshit. She seems the type!

I would be gutted if Dame Joan went woke. She was one of my earliest heroines.

When 'feminist' Shakespearean ACTOR Dame Helen was appearing in soft porn and playing gangster molls, Alexis Carrington was kicking ass!

Unfortunately she actually speaks really well on the difficulties women face in the entertainment industry, for example not doing comedy because "women aren't funny", and how women are now writing/directing films, doing comedy and being very successful, but in the same breath.... There's no such thing as a female.

It's a real shame so many people are dragged into this cult of word salad and contradictions.

A friend of mine once said never invest too much awe in any celebrity as they will always let you down.
From his side ( a right-wing voter) it was a frequent occurrence, but not very frequent for anybody on the left.
Now it's all different.
I would warrant it was easier to come out as gay in the 60s than it is for politicians and celebrities to come out as GC today.

Don't forget Frances Barber, she has been openly gc for ages

I was put off one of my favourite directors, Emma Rice, when she instituted 'gender blind' casting
I'm not a fan of Emma Rice (well, not at the Globe anyway, she's ok elsewhere), but I thought that gender blind casting was a positive move for women.
The' canon' is so dominated by male roles that if women are cast only as women they get few good chances. Gender Blind casting means eg that if you have 2/3 women in your company they will get 2/3 of the roles in eg Macbeth, whereas if you cast according to sex they get Lady M, the witches, and that's it.

I might have missed something though - are there negatives to Gender Blind casting that I've missed?

Pantomime. I rest my case...

But pantomime is the opposite of gender blind - all the major roles are always given to a specific sex (apologies for mixing sex/gender here, the OP used 'gender blind' but I think 'non sex-specific' or something might be better), the roles are swapped but not blind.

I cannot see anything rescuing pantomime, it's awful. Maybe if they swapped the sexes of the main cast? Ugly uncles and a female lead rescuing a prince?

The 'Gender blind' casting at the Emma Rice production of Wise Children meant that male actors took the part of one of the sisters (the main characters)