Helen Mirren

Dame Helen Lydia Mirren, DBE , 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, having won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 2007, after two previous nominations, for her performance as Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen. In 2015 she won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play, after two previous nominations, for her performance in The Audience, in which she also portrayed Elizabeth II. The Audience was written by Peter Morgan, who also wrote The Queen. Mirren won her first of several Emmy Awards in 1996 for her performance as police detective Jane Tennison on the acclaimed ITV series Prime Suspect, which ran for a total of seven seasons between 1991 to 2006.

She was born Helen Lydia Mironoff in Hammersmith, London, the daughter of Kathleen Kitty Alexandrina Eva Matilda and Vasily Petrovich Mironoff . Her mother was English and her father was Russian, originally from Kuryanovo, Smolensk Oblast. Mirrens paternal grandfather, Colonel Pyotr Vasilievich Mironov, was in the Imperial Russian Army and fought in the 1904 RussoJapanese War. He later became a diplomat, and was negotiating an arms deal in Britain when he and his family were stranded during the Russian Revolution. The former diplomat became a London cab driver to support his family and eventually settled down in England.

Source: Wikipedia