(Photo: Courtesy of HBO)

2. Helen Mirren
This year, she was the best queen—both as Elizabeth I on HBO and as Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect 7. (Not to mention as Elizabeth II in movie theaters.) Who knew that the English royal, in the middle of all that sixteenth-century empire building, spoke in sarcastic iambs, from a face painted like a playing card? And what can we expect from Scotland Yard now that Jane is smoking and drinking on her own time? Part whiskey priest from Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, part Mother Sugar, the Jungian analyst in Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook, she listened better than most people talk.