Danica McKellar

Winnie Cooper is a difficult inheritance. Danica McKellar, born in La Jolla in 1975, was cast in The Wonder Years as a child and became the default American memory of a first crush, which leaves a working actor in an awkward position: the part is famous, the performer is typecast, and the industry has no idea what to do next.

What she did next is the interesting part. She is a mathematics writer and education advocate as much as an actress, and her credits here include the children's picture book Goodnight, Numbers. The work outside acting has been about persuading middle-school students, girls in particular, to keep taking the subject. That is a rarer second act than another sitcom.

The acting continued in two lanes. One is voice work, where her range is far wider than her live-action image: Frieda in Static Shock, Miss Martian in Young Justice, Frost across the DC Super Hero Girls films, Judy Jetson in a WWE crossover that exists and is exactly as strange as it sounds. The other is the Hallmark Christmas movie, a genre she has worked steadily from Crown for Christmas through Coming Home for Christmas to Have We Met This Christmas?. Snobbery about that catalogue misses the craft inside it: those films are shot fast, on tight budgets, and they collapse unless the lead is genuinely warm on camera. She is.