Cary Elwes

Cary Elwes was born in London to the portrait painter Dominick Elwes and the designer Tessa Kennedy, went to Harrow, then crossed the Atlantic to study drama at Sarah Lawrence and left after two years to start working. His first film was the 1984 public-school drama Another Country, and by 1987 he was Westley in The Princess Bride, which is the sort of thing that fixes a face in the public memory for forty years.

What makes that performance work is the choice underneath it: everyone else in the film is winking and Elwes plays it dead straight, a swashbuckling hero with no irony at all, which is precisely what lets the jokes land around him. He spent the next decade being asked to do variations on it, sometimes brilliantly (Robin Hood: Men in Tights, Hot Shots!), sometimes as decoration in other people's blockbusters (Glory, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Twister, Liar Liar). His accolades include a Screen Actors Guild nomination and two Satellite nominations.

The second act arrived in 2004 with Saw, where he played Dr. Lawrence Gordon at full melodramatic pitch and became a fixture of a horror franchise he would return to in Saw 3D. Since then he has been a busy character actor with excellent comic timing, playing an art thief on Psych, a corporate hatchet man in BlackBerry, and Denlinger across two Mission: Impossible films. He is often the best thing in mediocre pictures, which is an underrated career.