Stephen Frears

Unanimously regarded as one of Britain’s finest directors, Stephen Frears has always embraced a wide variety of styles, themes and genres. He made his name in TV drama, working almost exclusively for the small screen in the first 15 years of his career. In the mid-1980s he turned to the cinema, shooting The Hit (1984), starring Terrence 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 and The Grifters (for which he was Oscar®-nominated) 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 (The Hi-Lo Country and 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 he was again nominated for an Oscar®. His subsequent films include Chéri, Tamara Drewe and Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight, produced by HBO. In 2013 he made Philomena, starring Judi Dench and Steve Coogan, which won a BAFTA and was nominated for three others, along with three Golden Globes and four Oscar®-nominations. Frears’ another film is The Program, starring Ben Foster as seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong. He also directed Florence, the story of a New York heiress who dreams of becoming an opera singer, in spite of the fact that she can’t sing. The film stars Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant.

Festival Internacional de Cine de Morelia