HELEN MIRREN really sunk her teeth into her latest film role.  She turned to her dentist for help with portraying Maria Altmann, a Holocaust survivor from Nazi Austria who the actress plays in “Woman in Gold,” opening Friday.  By coincidence, Mirren’s dentist in L.A. has an Austrian mother who was not only friends with Altmann, but shared a similar story.  “My dentist sent me this lovely film of his mother talking and she was another version of Maria,” Mirren tells The Daily News. “You know, incredibly elegant, beautifully put together with that wonderful very slight accent. That feeling of self-concealment and grace and intelligence.”  The film is based the real-life story of Altmann, who grew up in a wealthy household in Vienna. Artists like Gustav Klimt were regular guests and he painted her aunt, Adele Bloch-Bauer. The painting, dubbed “Lady in Gold” was one of several stolen after the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, and Altmann and her husband narrowly escaped and made their way to Los Angeles.  Decades later, Altmann challenged the Austrian government’s claim to the Klimt painting, eventually getting it back. Altmann died in 2011 at age 94 and the work is now on display in the Neue Galerie on the Upper East Side.  Mirren didn’t see the original painting until very recently when the gallery’s co-founder, Ronald Lauder, hosted a dinner party at Neue for her and director Simon Curtis. But she says she was affected by its beauty and tragic story earlier, while filming.  “I know it sounds terrible, but the big emotional reaction was really seeing a reproduction in Belvedere Gallery [where it hung in Austria] ... as Maria Altmann would have,” she admits. “I wouldn’t look at it until we did the shot when Maria walks around the corner and sees it ... That really was an emotional reaction because I was in the character, I was in the place where it had been hanging and it was kind of spectacular.”  Mirren, 69, is in New York for the next couple of months playing (once again) Queen Elizabeth II in “The Audience” on Broadway.  The monarch never caught one of her performances when the show premiered on London’s West End in 2013, but some palace employees did and gave her a huge thumbs up.  “A lot of people who work in the palace came to see the play and loved it,” Mirren says. “Absolutely loved it and did say, ‘That’s my boss,’ which was a huge compliment, so that was very nice and hugely gratifying.”  This may be Mirren’s third time portraying the 88-year-old U.K. queen — she also played her in the 2006 film “The Queen,” and in the West End version of “The Audience” — but that doesn’t mean she’s a royalist.  “I’m not a royalist, I’m a Queenist and a Princess Anne-ist and I quite like Prince Charles,” she says. “ This is judging them as human beings, not as royals, because the whole royal thing I don’t really get ... Having said that, I’d much rather prefer to have a benign royal family like we have than a dictator.”  Promoting “Woman in Gold” and starring in “The Audience” hasn’t left the actress with much free time. But when Mirren does get a day off, she plans on strolling about the East Village where she lives and taking a walk through Central Park. She also plans to stop by The Orchid Show at the New York Botanical Garden with her “Audience” co-star Judith Ivey because they’re both gardeners.  Mirren — who gives off a winning combination of intelligence, warmth and sexiness — sports a small tattoo of interlocking V’s on her left hand.  “Honestly I’m so shocked and horrified that tattooing has become middle class because it was one of the most rebellious things you could do when I got it done,” she says. “It was done on an Indian reservation in the late 70’s when really only sailors and criminals and gang girls had tattoos.  “My husband was so shocked. I had to cover it up when he first took me to Hollywood because the Hollywood community would have been shocked.”
Helen Mirren has personal connection to 'Woman in Gold' movie about Maria Altmann and artwork stolen by Nazis