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Stephen Frears tells the inspiring true story of an amateur historian who takes on the male-dominated establishment in academia.
Richard III died more than 500 years ago. When Philippa Langley encounters the British monarch in a Shakespeare production, he is often on her mind, for like him, she feels rejected in life. When she learns that the king's remains have never been found, she begins a tireless search -- in the face of all the skepticism shown by experts and her family.
Meet the director
Stephen Frears
Stephen Frears, born in Leicester in 1941, is a British director and filmmaker. For his more than five decades of working in cinema and television, he has earned numerous awards, including two Oscar nominations, a Primetime Emmy Award, and three further nominations. He has been nominated for Golden Globes and received three awards and 14 nominations from BAFTA. In the first 15 years of his career, he worked almost exclusively for the small screen with such programs as THREE MEN IN A BOAT (1975) and ONE FINE DAY (1979). In the mid-1980s, he turned to motion pictures, first in Britain, then in Hollywood, where THE GRIFTERS (1990) got him his first Oscar nomination. He continued his filmmaking with the Irish films THE SNAPPER (1993) and THE VAN (1996) both in his homeland and in a second phase of American films with THE HI-LO COUNTRY (1998) and HIGH FIDELITY (2000). He was again nominated for an Oscar in 2006 for THE QUEEN. His subsequent films include PHILOMENA (2013), which earned a BAFTA, was nominated for three more, and received three Golden Globe and four Academy Award nominations; THE PROGRAM (2015), about Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong; FLORENCE FOSTER JENKINS (2016), starring Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant, which received a Golden Globe nomination for best picture, and VICTORIA & ABDUL (2017) with Judi Dench, which was nominated for a Golden Globe. Frears returned to television with the BBC television series A VERY ENGLISH SCANDAL (2018), receiving a BAFTA for best director. This was followed by the Emmy award-winning short series STATE OF THE UNION (2019-2022). In 2020, he also directed the miniseries QUIZ about the TV cheating scandal involving the British quiz show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?". FILMFEST MÜNCHEN dedicated a retrospective to Stephen Frears in 2009, screening all of the feature films he had released up to that point.