Dame 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 between 1991 to 2006.