Marriage doesn’t need sex, says Dame Helen Mirren

London: Dame Helen Mirren believes sex is overrated, at least when it comes to marriage.

The 67-year-old claims that it is possible to be married, in love, and yet have no sex at all. “I don’t know why people have this idea that all marriages have to have sex because really, they don’t,” the Daily Mail quoted her as telling Australian Women’``s Weekly. This declaration comes from the woman who has oozed sex in movies and on TV – and who has even posed topless for a photoshoot in her 60s, reclining in a bath to promote her 2010 movie ‘Love Ranch,’ about a married couple who open the first legal brothel in Nevada, USA. At the time, she said she loved the idea of shocking people. “There are other types of glue that hold people together,” she said. Mirren has been married since 1997 to American director Taylor Hackford. The magazine claimed she was not speaking about her marriage but of the 54-year union between Alfred Hitchcock and his wife, Alma. Mirren plays Alma in the upcoming film, Hitchcock, which suggests that the master of suspense and his wife were no longer intimate because they slept in single beds. ANI