Annie Potts

Annie Potts had a Golden Globe nomination for Corvette Summer and a Genie Award for Heartaches behind her before Ghostbusters, and then she spent forty years being the best thing in scenes that were not written to be about her. Janine Melnitz answers the phone. That is the job. Potts turned a receptionist with a flat New York vowel and a bored expression into a character four films kept coming back to.

She is a very precise comic actor. The timing is Southern and unhurried, and she underlines nothing. Iona in Pretty in Pink runs a record shop and wears a different decade every week, and the performance runs on affection rather than eccentricity, which is why the film's most touching scene belongs to her rather than to either of the leads. The same instinct carries Designing Women, where she was the sensible one among four very loud people.

Her second franchise arrived through a recording booth. Bo Peep in Toy Story was a small ornamental part for two films, and then Toy Story 4 rebuilt her as a self-sufficient character with her own life, which is the rare case of a studio going back and fixing something. Television has given her a substantial late run as Meemaw in Young Sheldon and its spin-off, playing a grandmother with a gambling streak and no interest at all in behaving.