Danny Glover

Danny Glover reached film late and by way of the Bay Area stage, and 1985 is the year the industry noticed: Witness, Silverado and The Color Purple inside twelve months, playing a corrupt cop, a cowboy and a man who abuses his wife. Very few actors introduce themselves with that range, and fewer do it at thirty-eight.

Then Lethal Weapon, which made him a franchise lead for eleven years and gave American cinema its most quoted complaint about ageing. Roger Murtaugh is a genuinely good piece of acting hiding inside a blockbuster: Glover plays him as a competent, tired family man who has been handcuffed to a lunatic, and the entire series runs on his exasperation. Predator 2 gave him solo top billing for the first time.

He has spent the decades since spending that leverage on smaller and stranger things, often producing them, and he will happily take three scenes if the film is worth it. Hence the patient suitor in The Royal Tenenbaums, the detective in the original Saw, the veteran telemarketer in Sorry to Bother You, and a supporting turn in The Last Black Man in San Francisco. He is also one of the most politically active people in the business, which the Academy acknowledged with the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. Five Emmy nominations and four Grammy nominations sit alongside it, an unusual pair of numbers for a film actor.