Barbara Rafferty
Scottish television keeps a short bench of reliable actors and Rafferty has been on it since the 1970s. She was credited as Barbara Ann Brown early on, and the parts that made her a familiar face at home are the long-running ones: Ella Cotter in the BBC Two sitcom Rab C Nesbitt, two separate characters in the soap River City, Agnes Meldon in Hamish Macbeth, and Grandma Mainland in the children's series Katie Morag.
The film work runs alongside all that and shows a different register. She is the woman with a baby in The Wicker Man, which puts her inside one of the strangest British films ever made before most of her career had happened. Decades later she is Mrs. Garrigan in The Last King of Scotland, Madge Cameron in Go Now, a doctor in The Acid House, and Jean Monkrieff in The Legend of Barney Thomson, a Glasgow black comedy that suits her exactly.
What she does better than almost anyone in Scottish drama is the ordinary woman with no patience left. It reads as comedy when the script wants comedy and as something much harder when it does not, which is why she keeps being cast in both.
Movies (7)
TV (2)
Where to start with Barbara Rafferty
The friendliest way in is Hamish Macbeth, a Highland mystery series with a tone all of its own, and Agnes Meldon is exactly the sort of local fixture Rafferty plays without a wasted gesture. Follow it with The Legend of Barney Thomson, a Glasgow comedy of very bad manners where the humour depends on people saying appalling things in a completely flat voice.
The Last King of Scotland is the prestige credit and a small part within it. The Acid House is the most abrasive thing on the list, adapted from Irvine Welsh and not for everyone, while Go Now is the tender one.
The Wicker Man is here for the trivia value more than the performance, though the film is essential on its own terms, and Perfect Sense and Garrow's Law round out the range, from science fiction melancholy to courtroom period drama.