The Queen

Stephen Frears' The Queen won Helen Mirren the Academy Award for Best Actress at the 79th Academy Awards in February 2007, alongside the Volpi Cup at Venice 2006, the BAFTA, the Golden Globe and the Screen Actors Guild Award in the same season, one of the most decisive single-actress winning sweeps in awards-season history. The film also won the BAFTA for Best Film and was nominated for six Oscars in total.

The screenplay is by Peter Morgan, who had also written Frears' earlier Henry VIII two-part Channel 4 production with Ray Winstone. The Queen was Morgan's first major feature credit and the work that established him as the central British dramatist of constitutional-monarchy material, leading directly to his later stage play The Audience (2013, with Mirren reprising the role), the BBC series The Hollow Crown, and most prominently The Crown on Netflix from 2016 onwards.

The cast pairs Mirren with Michael Sheen as Tony Blair (his second of three performances as Blair across Morgan's work, after The Deal in 2003 and before The Special Relationship in 2010), James Cromwell as Prince Philip, Sylvia Syms as the Queen Mother, and Helen McCrory as Cherie Blair. The film is shot largely at Balmoral, Buckingham Palace exteriors and at Highclere Castle (later famously used in Downton Abbey) for the interior royal sequences. Cinematography is by Affonso Beato and the score is by Alexandre Desplat. It is widely treated as the foundational entry in Morgan's continuing thirty-year project of dramatising the late-twentieth-century British monarchy.