Stephen Frears

Stephen Frears (born June 20, 1941, Leicester, England) is an English film and television director known for movies that explore social class through sharply drawn characters.

Frears worked as an assistant director in theatre and film while directing numerous television plays. In 1971 he directed his first feature film, Gumshoe. After more television work, he won acclaim for the gay romance My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), which starred a young Daniel Day-Lewis. He continued to garner praise with Prick Up Your Ears (1987), a biographical movie about British playwright Joe Orton, and the American films Dangerous Liaisons (1988) and The Grifters (1990), for which he received an Academy Award nomination. He subsequently directed the comedies The Snapper (1993) and The Van (1996), both based on novels by Roddy Doyle, and Mary Reilly (1996), a retelling of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Frears received positive notices for High Fidelity (2000), based on Nick Hornby’s comic novel of the same name, and Dirty Pretty Things (2002), about London’s immigrant underworld. For The Queen (2006), which examines the British royal family’s reaction to the death of Princess Diana, Frears was again nominated for an Oscar. His later directorial efforts included Tamara Drewe (2010), a comedy loosely inspired by Thomas Hardy’s novel Far from the Madding Crowd, and Lay the Favorite (2012), a comedy-drama set in Las Vegas. Philomena (2013) was based on the true story of a woman searching for a child she gave up for adoption in her youth. The Program (2015) depicts a journalist’s quest to prove that competitive cyclist Lance Armstrong (Ben Foster), who won seven Tour de France titles, was guilty of doping. In 2016 Frears directed Florence Foster Jenkins, which features Meryl Streep in the title role of a delusional socialite who embarks upon an opera career despite a lack of vocal talent. He followed with Victoria and Abdul (2017), about the unlikely friendship between the aging Queen Victoria and her young servant from India, Abdul Karim.

Frears’s additional television work included the Cold War thriller Fail Safe (2000) and the HBO film Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight (2013), a drama involving the legal battle over the boxer’s draft-dodging conviction during the Vietnam War. He later directed the biographical miniseries A Very English Scandal (2018), in which Hugh Grant played the disgraced British politician Jeremy Thorpe, who was accused of conspiring to murder his former lover, Norman Scott. He also directed the comic series State of the Union (2019) and the miniseries Quiz (2020), about a man who cheated his way to the top prize on the TV quiz show Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?