Stephen Frears is an English director known for his work in film and television. He has been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director twice, for The Grifters and The Queen, and he has a lengthy filmography.
Frears attended Trinity College, Cambridge, where he served as a stage manager and assistant director for various student productions. It was after university that he got his start, first directing for television and commercial projects. Frears's first film was Gumshoe, a detective film, followed by My Beautiful Laundrette, an interracial gay love story shot on 16 mm. My Beautiful Laundrette was credited as launching Frears's career, as well as the career of its star, Daniel Day Lewis.
Following this success, Frears directed Prick Up Your Ears, a biopic about the life of playwright Joe Orton, with a screenplay by Alan Bennett. Then came Dangerous Liaisons with Michelle Pfeiffer, John Malkovich and Glenn Close. Other films that followed include The Grifters, Mary Reilly, High Fidelity, Dirty Pretty Things, Mrs Henderson Presents, The Queen, Chéri, Philomena, Florence Foster Jenkins, and, most recently, Victoria & Abdul in 2017.
Dirty Pretty Things is a 2002 film directed by Stephen Frears and written by Steven Knight about an illegal Nigerian immigrant and doctor, Okwe, who gets embroiled in a London underground organ market being run out of the hotel that employs him....
Stephen Frears's film The Queen, released in 2006, broadly tells the story of Princess Diana's tragic death and the response (or lack thereof) of the royal family in the days following her death. Particularly, the film centers on Queen Elizabeth...
