Annette Bening

Annette Bening trained on stage and it shows in the way she uses her voice, which is doing something deliberate at all times. She came up through the Colorado Shakespeare Festival in 1980, played Lady Macbeth at the American Conservatory Theater in 1984, and made her Broadway debut in Coastal Disturbances in 1987, taking a Tony nomination with it. Film came late by leading-lady standards: she was thirty when she started, and her first Academy Award nomination arrived with The Grifters in 1990.

Bening's specialty is the woman who has decided how life is going to go and is now defending that decision against the evidence. Carolyn Burnham in American Beauty is the definitive version, a real-estate agent slapping herself in an empty show home, and the film is far crueller to her than it is to her husband. Bening plays her without once asking to be liked, and wins the argument anyway. It brought her a BAFTA and a Screen Actors Guild award.

The same intelligence drives the roles people quote less: the con artist in The Grifters, the lobbyist in The American President who is written as a love interest and played as a professional, Nic in The Kids Are All Right, whose grip on her family is both the joke and the tragedy, and Dorothea in 20th Century Women, a mother trying to raise a boy by committee. Five Academy Award nominations, two Tony nominations and an Emmy nomination have produced no wins in any of the three, which makes her one of the very few artists to be nominated for the Triple Crown of Acting and take none of it.

Late career she is often the reason to watch something ordinary and occasionally the reason to watch something excellent: the swimmer in NYAD, Dianne Feinstein in The Report, the Supreme Intelligence in Captain Marvel. She remains the most rigorous person in most of her films.