Helen Mirren Helen Mirren Dame Helen Lydia Mirren, (; 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. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 2007 for her performance as Queen Elizabeth II in "The Queen" and received the Olivier Award for Best Actress and Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for the same role in "The Audience". Mirren's other Academy Award nominations include "The Madness of King George" (1994), "Gosford Park"
Judi Dench went to Nova Scotia, Canada, almost immediately after Williams's funeral to begin production on Lasse Hallström's drama film "The Shipping News", a therapy she later credited as her rescue: "People, friends, kept saying, 'You are not facing up to it; you need to face up to it', and maybe they were right, but I felt I was – in the acting. Grief supplies you with an enormous amount of energy. I needed to use that up." In between, Dench finished work on Richard Eyre's film "Iris" (2001), in which she portrayed novelist Iris Murdoch. Dench shared her role with Kate