Clare Higgins

Three Olivier Awards for Best Actress is a rare haul, and Clare Frances Elizabeth Higgins has them: for Sweet Bird of Youth in 1995, Vincent in Brixton in 2003 and Hecuba in 2005. Born in Bradford in 1955, she is by any measure that counts in Britain a stage actress who occasionally does films, and she made her Broadway debut with Vincent in Brixton, picking up a Tony nomination for it. That record explains the authority she brings to parts that would flatten a lesser performer.

Screen audiences know her for a horror film. As Julia in Hellraiser (1987) and its sequel she is the reason the whole thing works, and the performance is much stranger than its reputation suggests. Higgins plays a bored, disappointed woman who discovers what she is capable of and finds that she rather likes it, and she plays that discovery without any of the apology the genre usually insists on. Very few actors have made appetite look that unsentimental.

Everything since has been character work of a very high standard across British film and television, generally in roles that need somebody who can hold a scene with a single look: Mad Hettie in The Sandman, Mrs. Gilmore in Ready Player One, Miss Ada Cackle in The Worst Witch, Josie in Being Human, Molly Luscombe in The Libertine, Mistress Revels in Stage Beauty, Mavis in Toast, Klara in Fatherland, plus The Golden Compass, Cassandra's Dream, I Give It a Year and Midsomer Murders. She is rarely the lead on screen and almost always the most interesting thing in the frame.