Stephen Frears

Stephen Frears (1941- ), enduring and often unsung British film and television director, who proved his versatility in low-budget homegrown productions and major American films.

Born on June 20, 1941, in Leicester, Stephen Frears started his career working as director’s assistant on some of the most interesting British films of the late 1960s, including Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966, directed by Karel Reisz), If... (1968, Lindsay Anderson), and Charlie Bubbles (1967, Albert Finney), before graduating to direct such feature films as Gumshoe (1971, starring Finney and Billie Whitelaw), Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987, starring Claire Bloom and Shashi Kapoor), Dangerous Liaisons (1988, starring John Malkovich, Glenn Close, and Michelle Pfeiffer), The Grifters (1990, starring Anjelica Huston and John Cusack) and Accidental Hero (1992, starring Dustin Hoffman). Frears's trademark of combining observation of the relationships between two or three characters and humour was at its best in his biopic of Joe Orton, Prick Up Your Ears (1987, starring Gary Oldman and Alfred Molina), and the Roddy Doyle adaptation, The Van (1996, starring Colm Meaney), both films being resplendent with witty dialogue and the microscopic depiction of people living in claustrophobically close contact.

Frears moved on to a wider canvas in 1998 with The Hi-Lo Country—a 20th-century Western looking at the enduring friendship between two men who return to their homes in the American Midwest from service in World War II—and won a Silver Bear for Best Director at the 1999 Berlin International Film Festival. He then directed the film version of the popular Nick Hornby novel High Fidelity (2000), swapping its original London setting for Chicago, before returning to social realism with the bleak Liverpool Depression-era story Liam (2000) and a drama about London’s underclass of illegal immigrant workers Dirty Pretty Things (2002). In the musical comedy Mrs Henderson Presents (2005), Frears re-created the world of wartime London for the true story of Laura Henderson (Judi Dench), a widow who gained notoriety for staging nude variety shows at Soho’s Windmill Theatre, while The Queen (2006), starring Helen Mirren as Elizabeth II, offered a sensitive portrait of the British monarch in the aftermath of Diana, Princess of Wales's death.

Some of Frears’s best work has been on television: his direction of One Fine Day (1979, written by Alan Bennett), Bloody Kids (1979, Stephen Poliakoff), Going Gently (1981, Alice Thomas Ellis), Saigon: Year of the Cat (1983, David Hare), and The Snapper (1993, Roddy Doyle) revealed him as a fine interpreter of good writers. Even the admired feature film, My Beautiful Laundrette (1985, written by Hanif Kureishi and starring Daniel Day-Lewis), widely seen in commercial cinemas, was made on 16mm stock as a Channel 4 film. For the same channel he also directed the political drama The Deal (2003), about the rivalry between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown for the Labour Party leadership.