Dame Helen Mirren thinks she'll be a sex symbol until the day she dies

Speaking in this month's AARP Magazine, Helen - who stars alongside female icons Kate Winslet, Julianne Moore and Uma Thurman in the 2017 Pirelli calendar - said: "I think it's probably going to follow me to my grave."

And, although she's in the seventh decade of her life, the 'Queen'

star feels better now about life than she did when she was 25 years old.

She explained: "The idea of dying young when you're 25 is kind of cool

- a bit romantic, like James Dean. But then you realise that life is too much fun to do that. It's fascinating and wonderful and emotional... so you just have to find a way of negotiating getting old psychologically and physically.

"The best thing about being over 70 is being over 70. Certainly when I was 45, the idea of being 70 was like 'Arghhh!' "

Helen married her long-time partner Taylor Hackford in 1997 and has admitted the thought of having children has never really crossed her mind.

She said: "It's very hard to unpick your choices. But a lot of it was choice, absolutely. So yes, I did very consciously choose my work over my relationships right up to the time that I met Taylor. I was 38 when I met [him], pretty late in life. We got married in the end because we realised that we were going to be together forever. We got married, ultimately, for legal reasons more than anything else...I always said I have nothing against marriage, it just wasn't to my taste, like turnips."