Want the Secret to a Great Bikini Body? Ask Dame Helen Mirren

By The Editors of StyleList Posted Sep 29th 2010 09:45AM

Dame Helen Mirren isn't entirely happy with her body. It's hard to tell by a revealing lace dress she wears on the cover of the UK Women & Home magazine this month. And those photos of her looking stunningly sexy in a bikini (see in below video)? All an illusion, she says.

"Bits of my body are all right, but bits of me are horrible," the 65-year-old star tells the magazine. "To be honest, anything from the waist down I don't really like."

Not that she has anything to be ashamed of. The Brit beauty made jaws drop and inspired seniors to start wearing sexier swimwear after she was photographed looking toned in a two-piece in 2008. In truth, she says she was holding in her tummy.

"I don't know why, but I do, by nature, hold my tummy in," she says, calling it a "trick for making you look and feel good."

Another of her confidence boosters? "Four-inch platforms give you great height and make your legs look unbelievably long," says Mirren. "I used only to be able to get them in stripper shops, but now you can buy them everywhere -- although, unfortunately, that means everyone else has discovered the trick too."

Despite having recently posed topless for New York magazine, Mirren says that as she gets older, she'd much rather keep covered up. And she's particularly up in arms about the abundance of sleeveless dresses on the market.

"My big complaint is, why aren't more dresses made with sleeves?" she says. "I don't want to wear a frumpy jacket over a sleeveless dress and it enrages me that it's so difficult to find anything beautiful with sleeves.

"If you think of Elizabethan dresses or turn-of-the-century fashions, there are some amazing things you can do with sleeves [as recently proven by Julia Roberts], so why do so few designers put them on their dresses?" Watch Mirren Explain Her Bikini Body to Ellen Below

Up next for the Oscar-winning actress, she tries to tame Russell Brand in a remake of the '80s comedy classic 'Arthur.'