THE AUDIENCE's Helen Mirren Wins Tony for Best Performance Actress Leading Role

Helen Mirren has won the 2015 Tony Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play for her role as Queen Elizabeth II in THE AUDIENCE.

Mirren has won international recognition for her work on stage, screen and television. For her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen in 2006, she received an Academy Award®, Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Award®, and BAFTA Award for Best Actress. She was also named Best Actress by virtually every critics' organization from Los Angeles to London. In 2014 she was honored with the BAFTA Fellowship for her outstanding career in film. On television she played the title role in "Elizabeth I" for which she won Emmy, Golden Globe and SAG Awards.

Mirren began her career in the role of Cleopatra at the National Youth Theatre. She then joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, where she starred in such productions as Troilus and Cressida and Macbeth. In 1972, she joined renowned director Peter Brook's Theatre Company and toured the world. Since then her theatre work has spanned numerous productions in the West End, the Fringe, the RSC, the National Theatre and Broadway, including A Month in the Country, for which she received a Tony nomination, and The Dance of Death opposite Ian McKellen. Subsequent productions include Orpheus Descending at the Donmar Warehouse and Mourning Becomes Electra at the National, for which she received an Olivier Best Actress Award nomination. She returned to the National in 2009 in the title role of Racine's Phèdre directed by Nicholas Hytner. This made history when it became the first theatre production to be filmed for "NTLive" and was seen in cinemas throughout the world. In her most recent performance in 2013 in London's West End, she reprised her role of Queen Elizabeth II in Peter Morgan's The Audience, directed by Stephen Daldry, for which she won an Olivier Award for Best Actress.

In 2013 she starred alongside Anthony Hopkins in the film Hitchcock, and with Al Pacino in HBO's "Phil Spector," for which she won a SAG Award for her performance.On television she earned an Emmy and three BAFTAs for playing Jane Tennison in the multi award-winning series "Prime Suspect." Her other television includes "Losing Chase," for which she won aGolden Globe Award, "The Passion of Ayn Rand," for which she won a Emmy Award, "Door to Door" and "The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone."

Mirren's latest film is Disney's The Hundred-Foot Journey directed by Lasse Hallstrom and produced by Stephen Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey, in which Mirren portrays a French restaurateur Madame Mallory. Currently in production, Mirren will be starring in The Weinstein's Company's Woman in Gold, in which she plays Maria Altmann, the Austrian Jewish refugee who fought to reclaim her family's paintings that had been stolen by the Nazis in World War II.

Helen Mirren became a Dame of the British Empire in 2003.