The Queen's Birthday Honours list this year recognizes a number of big-name stage and screen actors, conferring a knighthood on actor Daniel Day-Lewis, making Angelina Jolie a Dame Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George for her advocacy work opposing violence against women and other humanitarian causes, and elevating Dame Maggie Smith (of Downton Abbey and the Harry Potter movies), already a Dame, to the rank of Companion of Honour.
Day-Lewis receives his knighthood for services to drama. Though best known for his film roles, the actor's theatrical experience dates back to his studies in the 1970s at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. His big stage break came when he took over the lead role in Julian Mitchell's Another Country from Rupert Everett in 1982. Subsequently he performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company, including as Romeo in Romeo and Juliet, but he hasn't appeared on stage since collapsing during a 1989 performance of Hamlet with the National Theatre in London, when, during the scene in which Hamlet's father ghost appears to him, Day-Lewis apparently believed he saw the ghost of his own father.
Best-known today as the acerbic Dowager Countess in TV's Downton Abbey, 79-year-old Maggie Smith has been a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire since 1990. That same year she won a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for Lettice and Lovage. In her own land the two-time Academy Award winner has netted no fewer than five Best Actress Evening Standard Awards for her London stage career, not to mention five BAFTAs, and stateside she's won three Emmy Awards and three Golden Globes. Her new Queen's Honour comes for services to drama.
Also honored in this year's list are Scottish actress Phyllida Law and Booker Prize-winning novelist Hilary Mantel. Adaptations of Mantel's works are currently playing at the West End's Aldwych Theatre.
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