Stephen Frears

Director

June 20, 1941 (85 years)

Leicester, England, UK

Biography

Stephen Arthur Frears (born 20 June 1941) is an English director and producer. He has directed numerous acclaimed films since the early 1980s, including My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), Dangerous Liaisons (1988), The Grifters (1990), High Fidelity (2000), The Queen (2006), Philomena (2013), Florence Foster Jenkins (2016), and Victoria & Abdul (2017). He has received two nominations for the Academy Award for Best Director. Frears is also known for his work on various television programs, includin…

Filmography

6.6

Play for Today

Play for Today is a British television anthology drama series, produced by the BBC and transmitted on BBC1 from 1970 to 1984. During the run, more than three hundred programmes, featuring original television plays, and adaptations of stage plays and novels, were transmitted. The individual episodes were between fifty and a hundred minutes in duration.

7.1

Screen Two

Series of single made-for-television dramas.

7.0

Playhouse

A one-hour anthology television series of one-off contemporary and classic dramas produced by the BBC.

7.0

ITV Playhouse

ITV Playhouse is a British comedy-drama TV series that ran from 1967 to 1983, which featured contributions from playwrights such as Dennis Potter, Rhys Adrian and Alan Sharp. The series began in black and white, but was later shot in colour and was produced by various companies for the ITV network, a format that would inspire Dramarama. Actors appearing in the series included Leslie Anderson, Gwen Nelson, Ricky Alleyne, Pat Heywood, Michael Elphick, Ian Hendry, Edward Woodward, Margaret Lockwood, Jessie Matthews and Lloyd Peters.

7.4

The Comic Strip Presents...

The Comic Strip is a group of British comedians, who do parodies of films, literature and sometimes major events.

7.0

BBC2 Play of the Week

An anthology of plays and novels adapted into feature length TV movies, broadcast on BBC2 from September 1977 to April 1979.

6.1

The Regime

The story of one year within the walls of the palace of a modern European regime as it begins to unravel.

7.4

The Loudest Voice

The rise and fall of Fox News founder Roger Ailes, focusing primarily on the past decade in which Ailes arguably became the Republican Party’s de facto leader, while flashing back to defining events in his life.

7.2

Dangerous Liaisons

In 18th century France, Marquise de Merteuil asks her ex-lover Vicomte de Valmont to seduce the future wife of another ex-lover of hers in return for one last night with her. Yet things don’t go as planned.

7.1

A Very English Scandal

It's the late 1960s, homosexuality has only just been legalised and Jeremy Thorpe, the leader of the Liberal party, has a secret he's desperate to hide.

7.1

High Fidelity

After his long-time girlfriend dumps him, a thirty-year-old record store owner seeks to understand why he is unlucky in love while recounting his "top five breakups of all time".

7.0

State of the Union

Tom and Louise meet in a pub immediately before their weekly marital therapy session. With each successive episode we piece together how their lives were, what drew them together and what has started to pull them apart.

7.0

The Queen

The Queen is an intimate behind the scenes glimpse at the interaction between HM Elizabeth II and Prime Minister Tony Blair during their struggle, following the death of Diana, to reach a compromise between what was a private tragedy for the Royal family and the public's demand for an overt display of mourning.

6.7

Florence Foster Jenkins

The story of Florence Foster Jenkins, a New York heiress, who dreamed of becoming an opera singer, despite having a terrible singing voice.

6.9

Quiz

The story of Charles Ingram, a former British army major who caused a major scandal in the early 2000s after being caught cheating his way to winning £1 million on the game show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? Ingram, his wife Diana and an accomplice, Tecwen Whittock, who was sitting in the audience, initially pulled off the on-screen heist before being caught and standing trial.

6.7

My Beautiful Laundrette

A young Pakistani Briton manages a rundown laundrette with his lover while dealing with tension in his family, the local Pakistani community, and a persistent mob of skinheads.

6.3

Hero

Bernie Laplante is having a rough time. He's divorced, his ex-wife hates him and has custody of their son, the cops are setting a trap for him, then to top it all, he loses a shoe whilst rescuing passengers of a crashed jet. Being a thief who is down on his luck, Bernie takes advantage of the crash, but then someone else claims credit for the rescue.

6.5

The Grifters

A small-time conman has his loyalties torn between his estranged mother and his new girlfriend, both of whom are high-stakes grifters with their own angles to play.

6.5

The Lost King

An amateur historian defies the academic establishment in her efforts to find King Richard III's remains, which were lost for over 500 years.

6.9

Victoria & Abdul

Queen Victoria strikes up an unlikely friendship with a young Indian clerk named Abdul Karim.