Actress Dame Helen Mirren has defended plastic surgery and said she can understand why some women opt for cosmetic surgery.

Dame Helen, 64, has not gone under the knife herself but said she does understand how women feel a certain pressure to look younger.

She said to UK TV show GMTV: “You go: ‘I don’t want to look at that face anymore.’ And I understand that, absolutely.” Dame Helen added: “I think people should be allowed to do whatever they want to make themselves feel happy.”

More from Dame Helen…the Queen of actresses called herself a “geriatric action star”. The label, while novel, hardly fits the 64-year-old Oscar-winner whose stunning figure recently popped up in bathing suit photos.

Mirren said: “I’m a retired special ops person in my next role. Actually, I just played a retired Mossad agent in a film called The Debt which is coming out this year, so, yes, I’m becoming a geriatric action star. I’ve been pretty lucky all my life – I’ve had some good roles. But I think that as you get older, if you manage to stay on being an actress, the roles by nature become more interesting because a person of 55, 65, or 45 is a more interesting person by nature because you’ve lived much longer than a person who is 15 or 25.”

Mirren, who won an Academy Award for The Queen (2006), is not short of work. She is listed for a total of seven upcoming films for 2010 and has recently played Sofya, the wife of Leo Tolstoy in The Last Station.