Part of Fast & Furious featuring Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Michelle Rodriguez, Jordana Brewster, and Tyrese Gibson.
Rise to Fame
She played Cleopatra at 19 for the National Youth Theatre and spent the next three decades being excellent in things most people didn't watch. The RSC, experimental touring with Peter Brook, gritty British crime films. The Long Good Friday in 1980 made the critics pay attention. The industry gave her two Oscar nominations before she actually won one. When The Queen came along in 2006, she was 61 and had been this close to the top for most of her career. The Oscar didn't discover her. It just made people admit they'd been wrong about her timeline.
In the Spotlight
At 80, she's running at a pace that would embarrass most 40-year-olds. MobLand on Paramount+ earned her an 18th Golden Globe nomination, her first ever in a TV drama category. The Thursday Murder Club hit Netflix in August 2025 with Pierce Brosnan and Ben Kingsley. The Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award showed up in there too. This is what 'staying power' actually looks like when it isn't a euphemism for coasting.
Side Notes
Her real name is Ilyena Mironova. Her paternal grandfather was a colonel in the Imperial Russian Army who got stranded in Britain after the 1917 Revolution and ended up driving a taxi in London. There's also a first cousin who was a Bond girl in Goldfinger. She has a tattoo near her thumb she got as an act of rebellion and has described herself as 'utterly disgusted' by it. She married her longtime partner at 52 for legal and estate reasons, by her own account. She's an atheist who still believes in fairies.