With age comes experience, both good and bad, and it's the latter that Helen Mirren, 63, focuses on during an interview with the October issue of British GQ, opening up about being date-raped and indulging in drugs in her youth.

"I went to a convent school until I was 18 and had never spent a night away from home, or gone to parties," the stately Oscar winner tells the magazine. "So I was very innocent when I went to college in London, and I was living on my own. And I found guys were horrible, mean, rude, insulting and so without feeling."

She acknowledges that she was date-raped "a couple of times. Not with excessive violence, or being hit, but rather being locked in a room and made to have sex against my will."

Mirren adds that she didn't report the attacks because "you couldn't do that in those days."

The actress then wades into the "tricky area" that is date rape, defending a woman's right to say "no" at any point in a consensual liaison and agreeing that if her will is ignored, it's rape.

But, she adds, "I don't think she can have that man into court under those circumstances. I guess it is one of the subtle parts of the men/women relationship that has to be negotiated and worked out between them."

She also offers her opinion on Mike Tyson, who was convicted of rape in 1992 and served three years of a six-year prison sentence: "I don't think he was a rapist."

Not surprisingly, Mirren's comments have raised the ire of several women's groups ("Dame Helen's comments are not only disappointing, but unhelpful and dangerous," a spokeswoman from the Rape Crisis Federation of England and Wales tells Time magazine), although perhaps it's a critical stance she'd applaud.

"Times have changed. ... I love the fierceness of young girls nowadays, and the way they just say, '[bleep] off,' because I wish I'd been taught to say '[bleep] off' when I was younger," she notes. "I wish I'd had those words in my arsenal of self-defense. Instead, I was polite and didn't have the courage to say that to men who wouldn't accept 'no' for an answer."

Meanwhile, the thespian also confesses to doing some hard-partying in the '80s, but says that stopped when she had a sudden moment of conscience and clarity.

"I loved coke. I never did a lot, just a little bit at parties," she recalls. "But what ended it for me was when they caught [Nazi war criminal] Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyons, in the early '80s. He was hiding in South America and living off the proceeds of being a cocaine baron."

Says Helen, who has eschewed cocaine for more than 20 years, "I read that in the paper, and all the cards fell into place, and I saw how my little sniff of cocaine at a party had an absolute direct route to this [bleeping] horrible man in South America."