The Queen is losing her posh accent, says Helen Mirren

London: Dame Helen Mirren, who has announced she will return to play the Queen in a new West End play, feels that the monarch has developed an ``estuary`` twang to her accent over the years.

Dame Helen, 67, who won an Oscar for portraying the Queen in the 2006 film of the same name, will play Her Majesty from the age of 25 to the present day in ``The Audience``. In studying for the role Dame Helen has said the Queen has shown incredible consistency in everything she does over the years, in her clothes, hairstyle and professional attitude. But she has noticed one slight change in that time, in the accent the Queen has used. “Her voice has changed, and I can use that... she had a terribly posh voice when she was young,” the Daily Mail quoted her as saying. “But now even the Queen, while she isn’t quite dropping the ends of her lines - though her grandsons do - there’s a tiny bit of estuary creeping in there. “I can use all that to signify the age range and we’ll come up with other things,” she added. ANI