Helen Mirren has been bringing up Kurt Cobain missing out on modern technology for years

Over the past decade, Dame Helen Mirren has been asked quite a bit about how she thinks about aging.

Mirren, 79, is grateful to have lived as long as she has. She’s experienced “a world without technology,” as she told The Standard, but has also had the privilege to experience modern marvels like GPS tools and the internet.

Mirren, over interviews dating back at least a decade, has a very specific way of illustrating that point: Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain, who died by suicide in 1994 at age 27.

“I always say, it’s so sad that Kurt Cobain died when he did, because he never got to see GPS,” she told The Standard on its “Brave New World” podcast.

“It’s the most wonderful thing, my little blue spot walking down the street,” she said of the technology. “I just find it completely magical and unbelievable.”

Mirren’s comments went viral online after other publications aggregated them from The Standard. On social media, people compared the quotation to the satire website Clickhole, which regularly posts images of celebrities with fabricated quotes.

The timing of Cobain’s death does functionally illustrate Mirren’s point, even though it’s a roundabout way to get there: the first webpage went live in 1991, and the Mosaic web browser, which was released in 1993 and could simultaneously display photos and text, made the internet more accessible to the general public. It wasn’t until 2007 that NPR declared that GPS had gone “mainstream” through personal devices, the same year that Google Maps launched on smartphones. Five years later, Apple launched its own smartphone-based product, Apple Maps.

So Kurt Cobain did not experience the GPS experience that Mirren describes. But she’s right about something else: she does kind of “always” bring up Cobain like this.

In 2014, the actor sat down with Oprah Winfrey for her film “The 100 Foot Journey.” At the time, Winfrey remarked on Mirren’s “energy and vibrancy” despite her age.

“You either die young or get old,” Mirren said at the time. “There’s no other way. I didn’t want to die young. Look at Kurt Cobain — he hardly even saw a computer!”

In 2015, she told Cosmopolitan that she was “thinking about Kurt Cobain the other day,” because she was stunned that he had never experienced the internet. She made similar remarks to beauty publication Get the Gloss that same year, and to The Daily Mail in 2016.

In 2020, Mirren mentioned Cobain in the context of GPS technology in an interview with Oprah’s website.

“The way I see it, you have two choices in life: You can either get older, or die. And I want to continue to see what life has in store,” she said. “I think about Kurt Cobain and all that he missed. I mean, how sad is it that he never knew about GPS.”

To be fair to Mirren, it’s not uncommon for actors or public figures to repeat anecdotes or particular turns of phrase in interviews. And for Mirren, who has been asked repeatedly about aging in her 70s, it’s understandable that she’d have a go-to anecdote about mortality.

As for why that anecdote is about Kurt Cobain? Aside from the fact that he’s a major cultural figure who died notably young, that’s anyone’s guess. A representative for Mirren did not immediately respond to B-17’s request for comment.