Helen Mirren hated Alfred Hitchcock when they first met.

The Oscar-winning actress plays the iconic director's wife Alma Reville in new biopic Hitchcock, but she has revealed she once endured a disastrous audition for the filmmaker's thriller Frenzy in the early 1970s because she felt he disliked the way she looked.

"When I was a very young actress I was sent for an audition with him. I don't think he would have auditioned me; I think he either thought you looked right or you didn't. I was arrogant and ignorant and, at that time, he was just not my kind of film director... So, I didn't really like him, and I know he didn't like me very much. He certainly didn't cast me. He took one look at me and went, 'Oh, good God. She's going to be a nightmare'... I didn't want to do it because all those roles were horrible anyway," she told The Huffington Post.

Helen's co-star Anthony Hopkins - who stars as Hitchcock in Sacha Gervasi's new film - also found the psychological horror expert to be rather unpleasant at times, and his extensive research to play the role led him to describe the director as "paradoxical." Anthony mused, "He can be dark, troubled, cold, ruthless and obsessive and also big-hearted, warm and ingenious. That was all part of his nature."