Beverly D'Angelo

Beverly D'Angelo had a genuinely interesting late 1970s: Sandra in the horror picture The Sentinel, Echo in Every Which Way but Loose, and Sheila Franklin in the film of Hair in 1979. In 1980 she played Patsy Cline in Coal Miner's Daughter and was nominated for a Golden Globe, and four years after that she was nominated for an Emmy for playing Stella Kowalski in a television Streetcar Named Desire. On that evidence she should have had a completely different career.

Instead she got Ellen Griswold, and it lasted thirty two years: National Lampoon's Vacation in 1983, European Vacation, Christmas Vacation, Vegas Vacation, the 2015 reboot, and a Family Guy special that borrowed the character wholesale. On paper the part is thankless, the wife who reacts. D'Angelo turned it into the load-bearing beam of the whole franchise. Ellen is the one who knows precisely how bad this trip will be and comes anyway, and Christmas Vacation only works because somebody in the frame is playing it straight.

She has appeared in over sixty films, and the rest of them are character work, some of it very good. Doris in American History X is the hard one, a mother watching her family come apart in real time. Otherwise she has spent four decades being the adult in comedies that need one, from The House Bunny and Harold and Kumar through to Insatiable and Violent Night, and she is still doing it well.