Dame Helen Mirren has spent time frequenting a brothel, but insists it was purely for research purposes.

The Oscar winning actress plays a madame in her new film Love Ranch, and visited the establishment to help understand the women who work there.

Mirren said: "They are people who have faced up to often great difficulties in their own personal lives, and they have dealt with it, and they are finding their own way through it. Women go into this profession, and indeed men, in a different way, for multiple reasons".

The film was directed by Mirren's husband Taylor Hackford, whom she first met in 1985 whilst working on White Nights. The inspiration for the movie was real life couple Joe and Sally Conforte, who founded the first legal brothel in the United States, The Mustang Ranch.

Hackford is expecting a backlash to the film, as it deals with prostitutes sympathetically. The director said: "One would expect it, this is America, you know, and we have done this piece that flies in the face of traditional mores of the puritan ethic, but to me, it is real,"