Dame Helen Mirren scares off bear

Dame Helen Mirren has shooed a bear off her property in Nevada.

The Oscar winner and her husband had just moved into a new house in Lake Tahoe when the coronavirus lockdown began in March, and she has found herself at one with nature in the past four months.

"We're not right on the lake but I can see it... It's really pretty..." The Queen star said during a recent appearance on Marc Maron's WTF podcast, "Incredible air and just endless entertainment by wildlife - chipmunks, and golden-mantles (squirrel)... and about 10 different kinds of birds."

The 74-year-old then said she found a bear trying to eat the food she had put out for birds on her property.

"I saw a bear the other day!" she exclaimed, "A great big black bear came by and stole all my bird food. I went out and I said, 'Bad bear! Bad, naughty bear! Very naughty bear!'"

Mirren reported that the bear retreated.

She added, "Funnily enough, I was just reading a book - a little pamphlet - about wildlife up here. They were saying what to do if you encounter a bear - if it's looking aggressively at you and hunching its back and looking like it's about to charge, they said you make yourself look as big as possible, if you can grab a stick, make yourself look big. And then it literally said: 'And then shout: Bad bear! Bad bear!'"