FROST/NIXON

Three-time BAFTA nominee MICHAEL SHEEN (David Frost) has gained a prominent place among the talented new generation of British actors on stage and screen. He earned a BAFTA nod for Best Supporting Actor in The Queen and garnered two more for Best Actor in the television comedies Kenneth Williams: Fantabulosa! and Dirty Filthy Love. The Queen also brought him the Los Angeles Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actor.

Sheen was most recently seen on screen in Music Within, the story of Richard Pimentel, an early champion of the rights of the disabled and a primary activist behind the Americans with Disabilities Act. Sheen portrayed his best friend Art, a wheelchair-bound genius who suffers from cerebral palsy and uses his wit to deflect the prejudice associated with his twisted form.

Prior to that, he was seen in Edward Zwick's Blood Diamond, opposite Leonardo DiCaprio and Djimon Hounsou, and as Prime Minister Tony Blair in Stephen Frears' The Queen. The Queen marked Sheen's third collaboration with Frears. He first played the British prime minister in Frears' television feature The Deal and made his feature film debut in the director's Mary Reilly, playing Dr. Jekyll's footman.

Sheen's other feature film credits include Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven; Laws of Attraction, starring with Pierce Brosnan and Julianne Moore; Timeline, directed by Richard Donner; Underworld; Stephen Fry's Bright Young Things; Shekhar Kapur's The Four Feathers; Heartlands, directed by Damien O'Donnell (East Is East); and Wilde, with Stephen Fry and Jude Law.

Sheen trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London where, in his second year, he won the coveted Laurence Olivier Bursary for consistently outstanding performances. While still a student at RADA, Sheen landed a starring role opposite Vanessa Redgrave in 1991's When She Danced, which marked his West End debut.

Sheen has since earned Olivier Award nominations for his performance as Mozart in Peter Hall's revival of Amadeus, Look Back in Anger and Caligula, for which he also won a London Critics' Circle Award and a London Evening Standard Theatre Award. He has received acclaim for his performances in such plays as Romeo and Juliet, Peer Gynt and Henry V. In 1999, Sheen made his Broadway debut, reprising the title role in Amadeus.

Most recently on stage, Sheen received a Distinguished Performance Award nomination from the Drama League, among other accolades, for his Broadway stage origination of the role of David Frost in Peter Morgan's play. This followed the sold-out run in London, where Sheen received nominations for Best Actor from the Olivier Awards and Evening Standard Awards.

At the beginning of this year, Sheen completed production in Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, in which he reprises his role as the dark Lycan master Lucian. The film marks the directorial debut of special-effects wiz Patrick Tatopoulos and stars Sheen and Bill Nighy.

Sheen most recently completed shooting The Damned United, which chronicles the larger-than-life soccer manager Brian Clough's turbulent 44 days in charge of Leeds United in 1974 (then one of England's most successful soccer teams). The film stars Sheen as Clough and is directed by Tom Hooper (John Adams), with a screenplay by Peter Morgan, based on David Pearce's novel.

Sheen is currently shooting the suspense thriller Unthinkable, directed by Gregor Jordan. Starring Samuel L. Jackson, Carrie-Anne Moss and Sheen, the story centers on a seasoned FBI agent (Moss) in charge of investigating suspected terrorist organizations with Muslim ties. When the FBI brings her in to help a black-ops interrogator (Jackson) with the interrogation of an American-Muslim man (Sheen), she must face the moral consequences of how far one should go to extract the truth from a

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