Amy Aquino

Harvard had her down as pre-med, majoring in biology. In her final year Amy Aquino worked out that she was spending more time acting than studying, left for New York, took classes and paid for them with a job at a law firm. Three years there produced no acting work at all. A recommendation sent her to Minneapolis, where she finally got cast, and in 1986, after two more years of rejection, she enrolled at the Yale School of Drama for three years.

What she does better than almost anyone in her bracket is play institutional authority without a shred of theatre about it. Lieutenant Grace Billets on Bosch is the model: on a police show, the lieutenant is the person who has to answer for someone else's methods, and Aquino plays that as tiredness rather than friction. The same instinct runs through Judge Thelma Hollub in Juror #2, Warden Alice Simms in Prison Break: The Final Break, and Dr. Christina Raynor in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, where she is the only adult in a room of people refusing to behave like adults.

The film work bookends it. Moonstruck in 1987 and Working Girl in 1988 put her in two New York pictures a year apart, both in small parts, and then came three decades of one-scene professionals: Dr. Toni Pavone on Felicity, Lois Carver on Crossing Jordan, Mrs. Schweiber on Freaks and Geeks, Peggy on Everybody Loves Raymond, Miss Martinez in White Oleander. Picket Fences brought a Screen Actors Guild nomination. Away from camera she served as co-secretary/treasurer of SAG-AFTRA until August 2015, which tells you as much about her as the resume does.