Stephen Arthur Frears is an English film director. Frears was born in Leicester, England, to Ruth M., a social worker, and Dr. Russell E. Frears, a general practitioner and accountant. He did not find out that his mother was Jewish until he was in his late '20s. Frears was educated at Gresham's School, Norfolk, from 1954 to 1959, and later went on to study law at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1960 to 1963. After graduating from Cambridge, Frears worked as an assistant director on the films Morgan! and if. , but most of his early directing career was spent in television mainly for the... BBC, but also for the commercial sector. Frears contributed to several high-profile anthology series such as the BBC's Play for Today, and produced a series of Alan Bennett's plays for LWT, taking responsibility for working in the gallery on The Old Crowd while Lindsay Anderson worked with the actors. In the mid-1980s, Frears came to international attention as an important director of British and American films.
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