Basil Mirren

Vasily Petrovich Mironoff was a member of an exiled family of the Russian nobility; he had been taken to England at age two by his father, Pyotr Vasilievich Mironov. Pyotr, who owned a family estate near Gzhatsk (now Gagarin), was part of the Russian aristocracy. Pyotr's mother, Mirren's great-grandmother, was Countess Lydia Andreevna Kamenskaya, aristocrat and a descendant of Count Mikhail Fedotovich Kamensky, a prominent Russian general in the Napoleonic Wars. Pyotr served as a colonel in the Imperial Russian Army and fought in the 1904 Russo-Japanese War. He later became a diplomat and was negotiating an arms deal in Britain when he and his family were stranded by the Russian Revolution in 1917.[15][16] The former diplomat settled down in England, and became a London cab driver to support his family.

Vasily also worked as a cab driver and then played the viola with the London Philharmonic Orchestra before World War II. During the war, he worked as an ambulance driver and served in the East End of London during the Blitz. He and Kathleen married in Hammersmith in 1938, and at some point before 1951 he anglicized his name to Basil. After the birth of Helen, Basil left the orchestra and returned to cab-driving in order to support the family. He later worked as a driving-test examiner, before becoming a civil servant with the Ministry of Transport. In 1951, Basil changed the family name to Mirren by deed poll.