Damian Lewis

American audiences met Lewis as an American. Band of Brothers, in 2001, cast the London-born actor as Major Richard D. Winters, and the performance is built almost entirely out of restraint: a man doing an appalling job well and declining to make a speech about it.

Nicholas Brody in Homeland is the opposite instrument and won him a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series along with a Golden Globe. What connects the two is that Lewis is at his best when a character is being watched and knows it. Brody is a man performing normality, Bobby Axelrod in Billions, which he played in six of its seven seasons, is a man performing appetite, and Henry VIII in Wolf Hall, which brought him a nomination, is a man performing a king.

Television has handed him the rest of the good roles too: Soames Forsyte in The Forsyte Saga, Charlie Crews in Life, Nicholas Elliott in A Spy Among Friends. Film has been thinner. He is Steve McQueen in Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, Yassen Gregorovich in Stormbreaker, Lord Capulet in Romeo & Juliet, Jonesy in Dreamcatcher. The exception is Keane in 2004, a small American film in which he takes the title role and is extraordinary, and which is far less known than it ought to be.

Recent work has drifted towards the historical and the odd: Peter and Will Radley in The Radleys, Lord Davenport in Fackham Hall, George III in The American Revolution, Montgomery in Pressure. He is a musician as well.