Helen Mirren

Born Ilyena Lydia Mironoff in 1945, she started with the National Youth Theatre playing Cleopatra at twenty, then joined the Royal Shakespeare Company and built a stage career that would eventually net her the Olivier and the Tony. Her first major film role came in 1969's Age of Consent, followed by a string of cult and prestige work through the eighties - The Long Good Friday, Excalibur, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. Four Oscar nominations arrived between 1994 and 2009, with the win coming in 2006 for The Queen, the second of her three portrayals of British monarchs. On television she defined the procedural lead as DCI Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect across fifteen years, winning three BAFTAs and two Emmys, then added two more Emmys for Ayn Rand and Elizabeth I. She's since moved between prestige drama and franchise action, appearing in Red and four Fast & Furious films, and was made a Dame Commander in 2003 by the queen she would later play.