Ann Dowd

For twenty years Dowd was the actor whose face you recognised and whose name you did not: a member of the Beckett family in Philadelphia, a pediatrician in Lorenzo's Oil, mothers and administrators and neighbours in Green Card, It Could Happen to You, Apt Pupil, Garden State, Marley & Me. Dozens of them, all credible, none showy.

Compliance changed that in 2012. She plays a fast-food shift manager who does escalating harm to an employee because a voice on the telephone tells her to, and her central choice is the whole film: she does not play stupid, she plays deferential. It won her the National Board of Review's supporting actress prize and, more usefully, it got her seen.

What she does better than almost anyone is unshakeable moral certainty, and the great late run is built out of it. Patti Levin on The Leftovers is a cult leader who has largely given up on speech as a first strategy. Aunt Lydia on The Handmaid's Tale is a torturer who believes she is a teacher, a performance that won a Primetime Emmy and a Critics' Choice award and has run for years without going flat. Joan in Hereditary is a warm, chatty woman at a support group, which is somehow the most frightening thing in that film. Mass in 2021 is her best work on film: four parents in a church room, and she holds the hardest position in the argument, with BAFTA and Critics' Choice nominations for it.

She is now in the odd position of being both a character actor and a headline. She returns as Aunt Lydia in The Testaments, and recent films put her name near the top of the poster rather than deep in the credits.