Helen Mirren has revealed she was surprised by how much she loves being married.

The Oscar winner had a 15 year relationship with film director Taylor Hackford before the pair married in 1997 and she said recently: “I wasn’t anxious to get married. We realised, as we were together over a longer and longer and longer period of time, that probably we were going to stay together.”

“It wasn’t, ‘Oh my god, I’d love to be married’. It was never that. I went into it very full of trepidation and worry.”

“I still don’t quite see the point of marriage, and I don’t talk about this from a religious point of view or moral point of view, but I absolutely did not see the point of getting married and then getting divorced. So I really didn’t want to get married.”

But with their tenth anniversary set to take place at the end of the year, she has “no question” it was the right thing to do: “From the moment I woke up after I was married I realised that I loved it.”