- Helen Mirren’s comments about Kurt Cobain never having experienced GPS went viral.
- But this isn’t the first time Mirren has mentioned Cobain — she’s been doing it for at least a decade.
- Mirren often invokes the death of the young Cobain in 1994 as she reflects on her approach to aging.
Over the past decade, Dame Helen Mirren has been asked a lot about how she feels about aging.
Mirren, 79, is grateful to have lived as long as she has. She has experienced “a world without technology”, as she told The Standard, but has also been privileged to experience modern wonders such as GPS tools and the internet.
Mirren, in interviews dating back at least a decade, has a very specific way of illustrating this point: Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, who died by suicide in 1994 at the age of 27.
“I always say it’s very sad that Kurt Cobain died when he died because he could never see GPS,” she told The Standard on her Brave New World podcast.
“It’s the most amazing thing, my little blue dot walking down the street,” she said of the technology. “I find it completely magical and incredible.”
Mirren’s comments went viral online after other publications picked them up from The Standard. On social media, people compared the quote to the satire site Clickhole, which regularly posts images of celebrities with fabricated quotes.
The timing of Cobain’s death functionally illustrates Mirren’s point, though it’s a roundabout way of getting there: the first website appeared in 1991, and the Mosaic web browser, which was released in 1993 and could display both photos and text, made the Internet more accessible to the general public. It wasn’t until 2007 that NPR stated that GPS had gone “mainstream” through personal devices, the same year Google Maps launched on smartphones. Five years later, Apple launched its own smartphone-based product, Apple Maps.
So Kurt Cobain didn’t have the GPS experience that Mirren describes. But she’s right about something else: she “always” brings Cobain up this way.
In 2014, the actor sat down with Oprah Winfrey for her film The 100 Foot Journey. At the time, Winfrey noted Mirren’s “energy and vibrancy” despite her age.
“You either die young or you die old,” Mirren said at the time. “There is no other way. I didn’t want to die young. Look at Kurt Cobain – he hardly saw a computer!”
In 2015, she told Cosmopolitan that she was “thinking about Kurt Cobain the other day” because she was surprised he had never experienced the Internet. She made similar comments to beauty publication Get the Gloss that same year and to The Daily Mail in 2016.
In 2020, Mirren mentioned Cobain in the context of GPS technology in an interview with Oprah’s website.
“The way I see it, you have two choices in life: you can either get old, or you can die. And I want to keep seeing what life has in store,” she said. “I think about Kurt Cobain and all that he missed. I mean, how sad that he never knew about GPS.”
To be fair to Mirren, it’s not unusual for actors or public figures to repeat anecdotes or particular turns of phrase in interviews. And for Mirren, who has been asked repeatedly about aging in her 70s, it’s understandable that she’d have an anecdote about mortality.
But why is that anecdote about Kurt Cobain? Other than the fact that he’s a major cultural figure who died remarkably young, that’s anyone’s guess. A representative for Mirren did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.