Helen Mirren, dressed as queen, yells at drummers outside theater

LONDON, May 6 (UPI) -- Helen Mirren loudly cursed at drummers performing outside the London theater where she was playing Queen Elizabeth II in "The Audience" during the weekend.

Mirren won an Oscar for her portrayal of the monarch in the film "The Queen."

The Daily Telegraph reported she was in full costume when she stormed out of the Gielgud Theatre Saturday night to tell passing musicians to quiet down.

"I'm afraid there were a few 'thespian' words used. They got a very stern royal ticking off but I have to say they were very sweet and they stopped immediately," Mirren told the newspaper.

"I felt rotten but on the other hand they were destroying our performance so something had to be done," she said. "The drumming just slowly got louder and louder and then settled right outside the stage door. There was just a thin wall between drumming and the theater so it was unbelievably loud on stage. Paul Ritter and I could hardly hear each other speak and the audience couldn't hear us speak at all. We were doing this last scene of the first act where the queen is being told she is going to lose Britannia [the royal yacht,] it's quite an emotional scene. I thought, 'We can't carry on like this; they have to stop.' I was so upset from struggling through the scene with Paul that I literally walked straight off stage, straight up the stairs and straight out the stage door and banged my way through the crowd who were watching and said, 'Stop; you've got to stop right now.' Only I might have used stronger language than that.

"They were very sweet and stopped the minute they knew I wasn't just a batty old woman haranguing them on the streets of Soho on a Saturday night," she added.