Alanna Ubach

Ubach has worked continuously since she was a teenager, starting on children's television with Beakman's World and picking up small parts in Sister Act 2, Airborne and The Brady Bunch Movie. Clockwatchers and Freeway in the late nineties showed she could do something other than comic relief, and then Legally Blonde made Serena, one third of a sorority chorus, into a character people still quote.

The skill is precision inside broadness. She plays loud people without losing the person underneath: Serena, Isabel Villalobos in Meet the Fockers, Naomi in Waiting..., all pitched high and all internally consistent. That control is why she has had such a long second career in animation. Mama Imelda in Coco is the family matriarch responsible for the ban on music in the first place, and Ubach makes her stubbornness sympathetic rather than shrill, which is the hinge the whole film swings on.

More recently she has been used for something harder. Suze Howard on Euphoria is a suburban mother whose comic timing keeps landing on genuinely bleak material, and the show relies on her to make its worst scenes bearable. She appears in The Last of Us, Mythic Quest and The Flight Attendant, and she played Jeanine Pirro in Bombshell.

It is one of the more useful careers in American screen acting: three decades of film, television and voice work, dozens of credits nobody attaches to a single face, and no obvious ceiling anywhere in it.