Ashley Judd

Ashley Judd was born into a country music family, the daughter of Naomi Judd and half-sister of Wynonna, and spent the first stretch of her career declining to trade on it. She made her television debut with a guest role on Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1991 and her film debut in Kuffs the following year, then did the small independent work that got her taken seriously, Ruby in Paradise above all.

For a run in the late 1990s she was the most bankable woman in the American thriller. Kiss the Girls, Double Jeopardy and High Crimes are essentially one machine with the settings changed: a competent woman is disbelieved by an institution and works out the truth faster than the men around her. Judd was good at the first half of that formula and better than the films at the second. What the thrillers obscured is how much she can do with less. Her scenes in Heat, as the wife of one of the crew deciding exactly how far her loyalty extends, are the strongest few minutes of acting in her filmography, and there are only a few of them.

The later career is uneven by choice as much as by luck. She has given much of it to humanitarian and political work, including missions to the Democratic Republic of Congo campaigning against sexual violence, and the acting since has been mostly franchise support, as Natalie Prior in the Divergent films, plus character parts. She is one of the few actors of her generation whose off-screen life is more consequential than her filmography, and she does not appear to regard that as a loss.