Constance Zimmer

Zimmer has spent decades playing women who are better at their jobs than the men around them and considerably less pleasant about it. Born in Seattle in 1970, she worked through the 1990s in guest spots before Entourage gave her Dana Gordon, the studio executive, from 2005 to 2011, and Boston Legal gave her Claire Simms in 2006 and 2007.

Read the character list and the specialism is obvious. Studio executive. Lawyer. Janine Skorsky, the reporter in House of Cards. Taylor Warren, the political operative in The Newsroom. Dana Berg, the prosecutor in The Lincoln Lawyer. Robin Larkin in Condor. What she does with all of them is a specific and undervalued trick: she plays contempt as professionalism. A line that would sound shrill from another actor arrives instead as somebody who simply does not have the time, and she can make a compliment land like a warning shot without changing her expression.

Unreal, from 2015, is where it paid off. Quinn King produces reality television, manufacturing other people's feelings for a living, and the part needed somebody who could be monstrous and sympathetic inside the same sentence. Zimmer took a Critics' Choice Television Award and a Primetime Emmy nomination in 2016 for it.

There is a second career in voice work that is easy to miss: Strongarm across Transformers: Robots in Disguise, and Veronica Cale in Wonder Woman: Bloodlines. She has worked steadily in series television since, from Big Sky to Harlan Coben's Shelter.