Blair Brown

The seventies handed Brown the parts that went to serious young theatre actors: a scene in The Paper Chase, a role in the mini-series Captains and the Kings, an early run on the drama Family. Then Ken Russell cast her in Altered States as Emily Jessup, the scientist watching her husband dissolve himself in the name of research, and that is still the film role people mean when they mention her.

Television gave her the better material. The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, which ran from 1987 to 1991, was a comedy-drama about a divorced New Yorker that behaved more like a novel than a sitcom, and it earned her four consecutive Emmy nominations. She was also in Copenhagen on Broadway, one of the high-profile stage roles on her record.

What she does, again and again, is authority with a private life behind it. Nina Sharp on Fringe is the clearest case, a corporate executive who always knows more than she is saying, and the performance works because Brown plays the withholding as fatigue rather than as menace. The same quality shows up in the smaller later roles: Dr. Anne Caruthers in Space Cowboys, the national security advisor in The Sentinel, Marie Finch on Limitless.

The rest of the list is a decent map of American film from 1973 onward, from the police ensemble of The Choirboys through Lars von Trier's Dogville to the small independent My Art. Her leads in Continental Divide and Strapless are not among the credits listed here, which is a pity, because the first is the best evidence that she could have had an entirely different career as a romantic lead.