Annabeth Gish

Mystic Pizza made Annabeth Gish a name while she was still a teenager, and the career since has gone somewhere more interesting than that kind of start usually leads. She was Kat in the 1988 film, and the late-80s and 90s run around it, Hiding Out, Shag, Coupe de Ville, Beautiful Girls, Nixon, The Last Supper, SLC Punk! and Double Jeopardy, is a spread of studio and independent work with no obvious plan behind it.

Television is where she built the real body of work, and specifically television where the ground keeps shifting under a character. She played Special Agent Monica Reyes on The X-Files, Elizabeth Bartlet Westin on The West Wing, Eileen Caffee on Brotherhood, Charlotte Millwright on The Bridge, Diane Gould on Halt and Catch Fire, and Sheriff Althea Jarry in the seventh and final season of Sons of Anarchy. What links them is a quality of controlled disquiet: Gish is very good at playing a competent woman who has already privately concluded that things are going badly, and she does it without signposting.

That is presumably why modern horror television keeps rehiring her. Mrs Dudley in The Haunting of Hill House, Dr Sarah Gunning in Midnight Mass, Eliza in The Fall of the House of Usher and Natalie in Before I Wake all come out of the same house style, and Midnight Mass gives her the largest and best part of the four. Nearly forty years in, her recent work is the strongest of her career.