If the bookies are on the money, Helen Mirren will be crowned queen of the Oscars today. Yet, as she steps off her jet at Los Angeles airport, she may be wondering where she will be resting her head tonight.

For Mirren is currently “between homes” in Los Angeles. She and her husband, Taylor Hackford, the American-born director of hits including An Officer and a Gentleman, The Devil’s Advocate, and Ray, have put their Hollywood Hills estate up for rent, and are expected to stay with family and friends until they sort out what they are doing next.

Mirren, 61, and her burly, bearded husband have been buying property since they got together more than 20 years ago. And, like smart investors, they rarely let it go. They have a mansion flat in Battersea, southwest London, and properties in New Orleans, including a handsome and relatively hurricane-resistant townhouse in the venerable French Quarter — “because I love the city so much, and my son Rio runs a couple of bars there”, as Hackford, 62, said recently.

When, over a working breakfast, I once asked Mirren about her place in LA, she dismissed it with a light laugh saying it was “just a place to stay” — but with two houses on six acres, it is closer to a castle fit for a queen.

The estate was built for Dustin Lancy Farnum, an old-fashioned stage actor who, like Mirren years later, made the move to moving pictures, making it big in Cecil B DeMille’s 1914 silent western The Squaw Man. He died in 1929, but not everyone forgot him: Dustin Hoffman said he was named after the cowboy star with the exceptionally large hat.

Farnum was not the luckiest of businessmen: he turned down the opportunity to invest in The Squaw Man, which would have made him a millionaire when $1m was worth something. Yet he did leave a solid house just above Sunset Boulevard — then a muddy pathway.

The six-bedroom main house alone is nearly 7,000sq ft, vast enough to swallow up the suburban home in a “very unglamorous working-class” corner of Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, where Helen Lydia Mironoff was raised, the granddaughter of an aristocrat from Smolensk stranded in Britain after the Bolshevik revolution.

But, just in case the dame needs some extra space to store the Oscar everyone is tipping her to collect, there is a guesthouse with an extra 2,700sq ft already converted into “high security offices and living space”. Outside, shielded by bamboo trees, is a barbecue area and a large pool, of course, reached by a brick-red staircase. Somewhere to stay, indeed, but not for much longer.

The couple, who have lived on the estate since the early 1980s, bought the property in 1996 through a tax-saving device — the Hackford 1991 trust. In December, according to records, Mirren and Hackford transferred ownership of the Farnum estate to something called the Jacaranda Trust, which is now offering it for rent at $40,000 (£20,500) a month.

It is not known what has prompted the changes or who might be living there next, although it could be a British star. Unlike Mirren, most prefer to rent rather than buy and deal with sky-high property taxes, earthquake insurance policies and the fact that few movies are actually shot around Los Angeles these days.

In fact, most British actors stay in hotels, such as the snazzy bungalows in the gardens of the Chateau Marmont. This is where Kate Winslet and Sacha Baron Cohen, the British nominees, are expected to spend time this weekend, although old hand Stephen Frears, director of The Queen, usually opts for a spare bed with friends, while Judi Dench has decided to stay at home.

A surprisingly small handful of British household names call LA home: old-timers like Michael Caine, who used to live in the monied enclave of Bel Air, sold up a decade ago. Catherine Zeta-Jones and her husband, Michael Douglas, have a big Beverly Hills pile, along with places in Mallorca and Canada, but seem to spend most of their time at their home in the Bahamas. Pierce Brosnan raised his family in Malibu, but recently sold his beachside house to get away from the crowds.

Craig Ferguson, the Scottish chat show host, lives in a glass house in the Hollywood Hills, while Kate Beckinsale lives in a surprisingly modest semi near Santa Monica airport.

Mirren says she loves LA, especially its many gardens and nail manicure parlours, but her drop-in at the 79th Oscar ceremony tonight may be her last visit to the city of angels for a while.

This weekend she will be taking time off from filming a children’s fantasy called Inkheart at Shepperton, which she will follow with a world war one drama Angel Makers, set in Yorkshire. And after that?

If she wins, Mirren will be offered the “Oscar payoff” — an absurd amount of money for one silly Hollywood blockbuster, maybe a remake of Cagney & Lacey or something equally absurd. That should pay for her next castle in the Hollywood Hills.

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