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Helen Mirren says men would expose themselves to her 'once a week' in her teens

Helen Mirren has said that men would expose themselves to her regularly when she was a teenager.

In an interview with NBC, which will air this weekend, she added that the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements have arrived not a moment too soon.

“This moment in time, this last sort of four or five months has been an enormous shift going on. It’s been coming,” she said.

“And I say, ‘Time’s up.’ Well it’s about time time’s up. You know, it’s taken a long time to get here.”

The Oscar winner also said that she has never experienced sexual harassment while working in the movie business.

“I had never experienced that in Hollywood. Because I came to Hollywood, I was in my 30s. I was too old,” she went on.

“It doesn’t happen to you unless you’re really young and that’s a whole reality that is nature that should be unpicked — or maybe it’s not nature; it’s cultural as well.

“But, you know, when I was in between 16 and 23, 24, men would expose themselves to me often, I would say about once a week. On the tube, on the bus, walking down the road.

“Weird, because it’s not like you’re going to go, ‘Oh my god, that’s the most gorgeous thing I’ve ever seen’. It’s the opposite. It’s horror.”

Her remarks come after French actresses Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve’s criticism of the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements.

Deneuve signed an open letter in which she defended men’s right to ‘seduce women’, and called #MeToo a ‘witch hunt’, though she later clarified her comments, apologising to victims of sexual assault.

“I am a free woman and I will remain so. I fraternally salute all the victims of odious acts that may have felt aggrieved by this letter published in Le Monde. It is to them and to them alone that I apologize,” she said.

Bardot, was less repentant, however.

She called the ‘vast majority’ of the #MeToo movement ‘hypocritical and ridiculous’.

“Lots of actresses try to play the tease with producers to get a role. And then, so we will talk about them, they say they were harassed,” she said in an interview with Paris Match.

She added that she found it ‘charming’ when a man would tell her she was beautiful or that she ‘had a nice little backside’.

She drew fire for the remarks, actress Mira Sorvino tweeting:

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