Dame Helen Mirren chased a North American black bear out of her US home after it broke into her garden and stole her bird feed.

The 74-year-old actress has been locked down at her new base in Lake Tahoe, in the Sierra Nevada mountain range, where she had been enjoying the “endless entertainment by wildlife”… until the pesky intruder stole her nuts.

“I went out and I said: ‘Bad bear, very naughty bear’,” says the feisty actress – which saw him take heed and retreat.

“He looked at me and lumbered off,” she laughs.

Black bears can grow to 6ft and weigh up to 30 stone but they rarely attack humans.

“I was just reading a book – a little pamphlet about wildlife up here, and it said what to do if you encounter a bear and it’s looking aggressively at you and hunching its back and looking like it’s about to charge,” explains Dame Helen.

Unfazed by the incident, she chuckled over how the incident resembled Shakespeare’s famous stage direction: “Exit, pursued by a bear.”

Meanwhile, Dame Helen praised the Queen, who she portrayed in a 2006 film, because she “never got fat, she never got thin, she never became addicted to anything – she just steadily went on”.

“She is like this amazing ship that just carries on through all the storms,” the star told the WTF with Marc Maron podcast.

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