Stephen Frears
Director & producer
Unanimously regarded as one of Britain’s finest directors, Stephen Frears has always embraced a wide variety of styles, themes and genres. Born in Leicester in England and educated at the Trinity College in Cambridge, Stephen Frears started his career with stage director Lindsay Anderson working as an assistant stage manager at London’s Royal Court which led to work as the assistant director of filmmaker Karel Reisz. He directed his debut feature film Gumshoe in 1971 and then worked almost exclusively for the small screen in the first 15 years of his career, with programs such as One Fine Day by Alan Bennett and Three Men in a Boat by Tom Stoppard. Stephen’s more recent TV work includes Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight for HBO and Channel 4’s The Deal starring Michael Sheen and David Morrissey.
In the mid-1980s he turned to the cinema, shooting The Hit (1984), starring Terence Stamp, John Hurt and Tim Roth. The following year he made My Beautiful Laundrette for Channel 4, which crossed over to big-screen audiences and altered the course of his career. After directing its companion piece Sammy And Rosie Get Laid and the Joe Orton biopic Prick Up Your Ears, he began working in Hollywood, with Dangerous Liaisons, an adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s famous novel with Glen Close, John Malkovich and Michelle Pfeiffer and winner of three Academy Awards, the noir film The Grifters, dark comedy Hero with Dustin Hoffman, or fantastic drama Mary Reilly starring Julia Roberts, among his most notable titles.
Returning closer to home, he directed The Snapper and The Van, two Irish films based on Roddy Doyle stories and, after a second spell of making American films (western The Hi-Lo Country and romantic comedy High Fidelity), based himself largely in Britain. Frears showed his versatility with two vastly different movies – Dirty Pretty Things, a realistic account of immigrant life in London, and Mrs Henderson Presents, a nostalgic backstage comedy-drama. For his 2006 film The Queen, starring Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II, he was again nominated for an Oscar. His subsequent films included Cheri, Tamara Drewe, Philomena, starring Judi Dench and Steve Coogan, which won a BAFTA and was nominated for three others, along with three Golden Globe and four Oscar nominations; The Program, which starred Ben Foster as seven time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong; and Florence Foster Jenkins, starring Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant, which received various accolades including a Golden Globe nomination for Best Picture and an Oscar nomination for Streep.
Frears followed this with Victoria & Abdul, which starred Judi Dench, then The Lost King starring Steve Coogan and Sally Hawkins in 2022. Frears’ return to TV was with the acclaimed three-part BBC television series A Very English Scandal, which starred Hugh Grant and Ben Whishaw, and won Stephen a BAFTA for Best Director. This was followed by the Emmy award-winning short form series State of The Union written by Nick Hornby for Sundance TV, and then the equally scandalous Quiz for ITV. Most recently, he directed Brian and Maggie for Channel 4 shortly after helming The Regime for HBO, starring Kate Winslet.
