BEVERLY HILLS (REUTERS) - Helen Mirren is no stranger to playing real life characters but in Winchester, the British actress has taken on a part she says was "catnip" to her - the mysterious Sarah Winchester.
"Her history was fascinating," she said. "The fact that she married this incredibly wealthy man, the inheritor of the wealth of the Winchester rifle and then she lost her husband and her daughter at a very young age.
"One of the legends that grew up around her was the legend that she bought the house to placate the ghosts who had been murdered or killed by the Winchester rifle and the sense of guilt and the pressure and the weight of those spirits upon her."
The story goes that Sarah kept building more and more rooms in the mansion to house spirits, and to this day the Winchester house is seen as one of the most haunted in the United States, as well as one of the most unusual.
"There's nothing like it," said fellow actor Jason Clarke.
Mirren agreed with him: "There's nothing like it, no."
"The stairs just keep going," continued Clarke. "How or why could anybody build stairs like that? Why is that door literally going nowhere? There's something quite unlike anything else. It's quite an event."
But Winchester isn't about architecture, of course. It's about ghosts.
"Ghost stories have been told by people over fires for thousands of years so the world of the spirits is very present in the human experience," said Mirren. "We talk about it, we think about it, it's in our art, it's in our culture. It's an authentic part of the human experience."
And at the premiere, the human experience extended to a psychic reading which was broadcast to theatres across North America.
The ghosts of Winchester are now in cinemas across North America.
