Helen Mirren says the saddest part of Kurt Cobain’s untimely death is that he never got to use sat nav

'It’s the most wonderful thing to watch my little blue spot walking down the street'

The legendary actor was speaking in a new interview about aging in the public eye, which she admitted was "not brilliant."

The 79-year-old told Evgeny Lebedev on the Brave New World podcast that she never thought she would reach the age is she is.

She said: “I’m 79. I never thought I’d be 79. And then you say, okay, well, this is it. This is what 79 is, you know. And it’s kind of okay. It’s not brilliant. But it wasn’t that brilliant to be 25 either.

“So it’s not a question of seeking youth at all. It’s a question of living the life you have as fully and positively and enjoyably and confusingly and everything that it was when you were younger. It’s just called life.”

Dame Helen said she considered herself "lucky" to reach old age. This prompted her to reflect on celebrities who died young, included Kurt Cobain, who killed himself at the age of just 27 in 1994.

Discussing the Nirvana musician's tragic death, Mirren said it's sad that he never saw the invention of satellite navigation.

“I always say it’s so sad that Kurt Cobain died when he did because he never saw GPS as it’s the most wonderful thing to watch my little blue spot walking down the street. I just find it completely magical and unbelievable,” she said.

On the subject of technology, Mirren said it had "destroyed everything," and she was grateful to have grown up in a "world before technology."

She said: "From this point on, the human world will only know technology unless there’s some unbelievably catastrophic event and only a few people left on the planet.

“And everything, everything has been destroyed from this point on. For the rest of humanity, however long humanity survives, it will be a world of technology. And I’m so grateful that I was of a generation that knew the world before technology. And you know we will die out eventually.”