Among British actors of her generation - those who came of age in the 1960s when Peter Hall ran the RSC and Laurence Olivier the National - Helen Mirren has had one of the most varied and exemplary careers of all.
There have been triumphs on stage, on television and in British and American movies, and her 35-year career is dotted with masterclass examples of fine acting.
You can pick them out almost at random: In Troilus And Cressida for Hall, Michael Powell's Age Of Consent in 1969, O Lucky Man! for Lindsay Anderson, an avant garde 1976 film of Hamlet in which she played both Gertrude and Ophelia (the Dane was played by twin brothers), and Dennis Potter's masterpiece Blue Remembered Hills.
Her career was more stage-based until the 1980s, which meant that her work on film took a while to acquire focus.
After her hard-as-nails, soft-as-silk moll to Bob Hoskins' gangster in The Long Good Friday, and her unnerving Morgana in Excalibur, she was noticed by the Hollywood studios, marked out as a benchmark for quality, but only made tentative Tinseltown forays like 2010, White Knights (directed by future partner Taylor Hackford) and The Mosquito Coast.
A decade after Long Good Friday she had another double-whammy with The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover, which stormed the arthouses in 1990, and the evergreen Prime Suspect.
Since then she's kept on knocking out impeccable performances in films as varied as Every Mother's Son, The Passion Of Ayn Rand, Last Orders, Gosford Park and now Calendar Girls (pictured).
Along with the acting achievements there is also the awkward beauty, which, in the manner of 1960s icons like Christie, Rampling and Deneuve, seems impervious to time or gravity.
Somehow Mirren's superficially imperfect, slightly bold facial features have always composed themselves into an exquisite, deeply expressive harmony inseparable from beauty. (One day, doctoral students will write papers comparing and contrasting Mirren and Susan Sarandon in terms of their shared commitment to shirtlessness.)
Mirren says she's "famous for being cool about not being gorgeous." What IS she talking about?
Career high There are so many that it becomes a matter of personal taste. For now, I'll settle for Last Orders, but she'll probably do something equally brilliant tomorrow or the day after.
Career low Caligula was embarrassing for everyone involved, Mirren included, but she was still pretty great anyway.
Need to know Daughter of a Russian aristocrat who was stranded in London after the Revolution in 1917. First turned heads as Cleopatra at the National Youth Theatre, aged 19.
The last word "Actors are rogues and vagabonds. Or they ought to be. I can't stand it when they behave like solicitors from Penge."
