Academy Award for Best Actress

2006

Helen Mirren 

as

Queen Elizabeth II

The Queen

Helen Lydia Mirren, DBE (née Mironoff; born 26 July 1945), is an English actor. Mirren began her acting career with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1967, and is one of the few performers who have achieved the Triple Crown of Acting, having won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 2007, after two previous nominations, for her performance as Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen. In 2015 she won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play, after two previous nominations, for her performance in The Audience, in which she also portrayed Elizabeth II. The Audience was written by Peter Morgan, who also wrote The Queen. Mirren won her first of several Emmy Awards in 1993 for her performance as police detective Jane Tennison on the acclaimed ITV series Prime Suspect, which ran for a total of seven seasons from 1991 to 2006.

Some of her other notable film roles include Marcella in the 1984 film Cal, for which she won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), The Madness of King George (1994), Teaching Mrs. Tingle (1999), Gosford Park (2001), Calendar Girls (2003), The Last Station (2009), Hitchcock (2012), and The Hundred-Foot Journey (2014). She also starred as Victoria Winslow in the action-comedy series Red and Red 2.

In 2003, she was made a Dame in the Order of the British Empire for Services to the Performing Arts. In 2013, Mirren was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and in 2014, BAFTA announced that Mirren would be the recipient of the Academy Fellowship.