Helen Mirren
Born: Chiswick, England
Where: July 26, 1946
The twice Oscar-nominated star has grown into one of Britain's most respected actresses in a career spanning five decades.
Big screen highlights include Cal, The Long Good Friday, The Madness of King George and Gosford Park as well as the hit TV series Prime Suspect.
From the age of 13 when she played Caliban in a school production of The Tempest, she knew she wanted to be an actress.
"All you have to do is to look like cr*p on film and everyone thinks you're a brilliant actress. Actually, all you've done is look like cr*p."
The daughter of a Russian taxi driver, she successfully auditioned for the National Youth Theatre.
Mirren - in a talismanic piece of casting -played the Egyptian queen in Antony & Cleopatra at just 18 at London's Old Vic Theatre.
She would later play the part in 1983 opposite Michael Gambon and again in 1998 with Alan Rickman.
By the time she was 20, she was a company member at the Royal Shakespeare Company where she excelled in her numerous appearances.
Due to her penchant for disrobing on film (in Age of Consent and Lady MacBeth) she was tagged as the Sex Queen of Stratford.
In the mid-1970s, Mirren enjoyed a breakthrough with her acclaimed performance as Nina in a West End revival of Chekhov's The Seagull.
The actress even managed to bring a measure of grace to her part as the most promiscuous woman in Rome in the controversial Caligula.
Her profile was raised with a strong turn as the lover of a gangster (Bob Hoskins) in The Long Good Friday and she lent an appropriately seductive air to the evil Morgana in Excalibur.
With Cal, Mirren hit new heights as the widow of a British soldier who unwittingly falls in love with the Irishman (John Lynch) responsible for his death.
She got to draw on her heritage when she was cast as a Russian astronaut in 2010 and as Mikhail Baryshnikov's lover in White Nights.
The film introduced Mirren to director Taylor Hackford who became her off-screen companion and later her husband.
She was formidable as the wife who follows her husband to Central America in The Mosquito Coast and excellent as a painter who catches the eye of spy Ben Kingsley in Pascali's Island.
Mirren rounded out the decade with a fine turn as the long-suffering spouse of an abusive criminal (Michael Gambon) in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.
She then found her signature role in 1990 when she was cast as Detective Inspector Jane Tennison in the superb Prime Suspect.
Tennison was an inspired creation: a middle-aged woman trying - and mostly succeeding - to make it in a man's world.
On the big screen, she was cast as the loyal queen to the increasingly irascible monarch in The Madness of King George, which landed her an Oscar nomination.
Moving into production, Mirren served as an associate producer on Some Mother's Sons in which she starred as the parent of a man arrested and imprisoned for alleged ties to the IRA.
She had two of her best screen roles in 2001, playing the officious housekeeper of an English estate in the Robert Altman-directed Gosford Park and as Michael Caine's widow in Last Orders.
Gosford Park brought the actress her second Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress.
She made her Broadway debut in A Month in the Country in 1995 and returned to London in Collected Stories and Orpheus Descending.
Mirren was made a Dame of the British Empire in the Queen's Birthday Honours in June 2003.
In 2003, she appeared as a stalwart of the Womens' Institute in the light comedy Calendar Girls with Julie Walters, Celia Imrie and Annette Crosbie.
The following year she starred in the thriller The Clearing alongside Rober Redford and went on to voice "Deep Thought" in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.
In 2006, she attracted considerable acclaim for her portrayal of Elizabeth II in director Stephen Frear' comedy-drama The Queen alongside Michael Sheen as Tony Blair.
