The Lost King is a very Stephen Frears kind of film. It features a royal, a true story where fact and fiction are blurred, a determined woman, and a peculiarly British kind of power struggle.
These things have occurred before in Frears’ long and varied screen career as a director who, at 81, keeps up a prodigious work rate.
Having got himself noticed in the ’80s with the era-defining Brit-flicks Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, Prick Up Your Ears and My Beautiful Laundrette, Frears got his ticket to Hollywood via Dangerous Liaisons.
By the 2000s, he had gravitated back across the Atlantic. Since, he has delivered monarchs – the film starring Helen Mirren as Elizabeth II that acted as a prototype for for its writer Peter Morgan – and .