“He never got to see GPS”: Helen Mirren feels “sad” for Kurt Cobain, but not for the reason you might expect

Now here’s what you call a fresh perspective: in an interview with the London Evening Standard (now a weekly paper called the London Standard) award-winning actress Helen Mirren has said that she feels “sad” that Kurt Cobain died when he did. Why? “Because he never got to see GPS.”

Not the first thing you immediately think of when one’s mind turns to the tragic leader of Nirvana, but there you go.

Helen Mirren is pretty amazed by GPS, it seems: “It’s the most wonderful thing, my little blue spot walking down the street. I just find it completely magical and unbelievable.”

Nirvana - About A Girl (Live On MTV Unplugged, 1993 / Unedited) - YouTube

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It’s not the first time Mirren has referenced Cobain in an interview. Turns out he’s often on her mind. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2014, she said: “Look at Kurt Cobain - he hardly even saw a computer! The digital stuff that’s going on is so exciting. I’m just so curious about what happens next.”

A year later, she was speaking with Cosmopolitan when she came out with: “I was thinking about Kurt Cobain the other day and he died without knowing the internet, and I’m totally blown away by that.” Then the following year she told the Daily Mail: “If I’d died at 27, the age that Kurt Cobain died in 1994, I’d never have even known there was an internet! Incredible things are happening all the time and I can’t wait to see what comes next.”

So, is Mirren a fan? Or is it just that when she thinks of the huge leaps forward in technology we’ve seen in the past two decades her mind instantly alights upon Nirvana? Why him then and not the many other famous people cut down before their time in 1994 - Ayrton Senna, Bill Hicks, Labour leader John Smith, or Derek Jarman?

Who knows? In the interview Mirren was making the wider point of how fortunate she feels to have made it to the age of 79. “If you’re lucky, you get to be older,” she said. “And then there you are. Oh my God, I’m 79! I never thought I’d be 79. And then you say, OK, well this is it. This is what 79 is. And it’s kind of OK. It’s not brilliant, but it was not that brilliant to be 25 either.”