Amanda Wyss

Two of the most quoted American teen films of the 1980s have Amanda Wyss in them. She was Lisa in Fast Times at Ridgemont High in 1982, part of the ensemble that turned Cameron Crowe's book into the template for the decade, and Beth in Better Off Dead in 1985. In between came the credit that made her a permanent fixture of an entirely different genre.

In A Nightmare on Elm Street she plays Tina Gray, the friend whose nightmare opens the film and whose bedroom becomes the setting for the sequence everyone remembers. Her contribution to it is routinely underrated: the terror has to be legible before any of the effects work is, and it is the performance that sells the idea of something doing this to her rather than of an actor falling over.

The rest of the 1980s and 1990s spread out from there. Phoebe in Silverado, the investigative reporter Randi across 1992 and 1993 on Highlander: The Series, Bridgit Cagney in Cagney & Lacey, Dana in My Two Dads, Nova in the short-lived science fiction series Otherworld, and two episodes of Cheers as Woody's ex-girlfriend Beth.

She never left. The recent decades have gone largely to independent horror, where being an Elm Street original carries real weight: Big Legend, The Hatred, The Sandman, Badland, The Graves. She also appears in Never Sleep Again, the exhaustive documentary about the film that will not let her go.