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Helen-Mirren

Famous Britons with Russian ancestry include actress Helen Mirren. Her grandfather was stranded in London during the Russian Revolution in 1917. He became a cabbie. Her father Vasily changed the family name to Mirren from Mironov. The photograph above is from The Daily Mail. She’s with one of the relatives from the ancestral village near Smolensk that the newspaper in 2007 helped her trace. Read more