Alice Krige

Alice Krige was born in Upington, South Africa in 1954, read psychology and literature at Rhodes University before switching to drama, and then moved to London to train at the Central School of Speech and Drama. Her breakthrough came all at once in 1981: Sybil Gordon, the Gilbert and Sullivan singer in Chariots of Fire, and Eva Galli in the supernatural horror Ghost Story. The same year she won a Laurence Olivier Award for the West End production of Arms and the Man, and she later joined the Royal Shakespeare Company.

What she does better than almost anyone is courtesy as a threat. She rarely raises her voice or hurries a line, and the effect is that whatever she is playing seems to be operating on information the other characters do not have. The Borg Queen in Star Trek: First Contact is the definitive case: the script asked for a mechanical villain and she played seduction instead, which is why the character stuck and why a purely functional antagonist became one of the franchise's most recognisable faces.

Horror has kept her busy since, and she takes it seriously even when the films do not. Mary Brady in Sleepwalkers, the fanatic Christabella in Silent Hill, the witch in Gretel and Hansel, Mrs. Mc. in the 2022 Texas Chainsaw Massacre. She has also done Lady Jessica in Children of Dune, Eir in Thor: The Dark World, character work in The OA, Carnival Row and The Rig, and, at the far end of the same career, three A Christmas Prince films as Queen Helena.