Debra Messing

Messing came out of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts into shows that did not last. Ned & Stacey ran two seasons on Fox; the ABC thriller Prey came and went in 1998. The pattern broke that same year with Grace Adler, the interior designer at the middle of Will & Grace, a part she played across the original NBC run and again in the 2017 revival. Seven Golden Globe nominations and five Emmy nominations followed, with one Emmy win in 2003, plus Screen Actors Guild ensemble awards for the cast.

Her real skill is the timing of embarrassment. Grace works because Messing commits completely to the half second in which a character realises she has said the wrong thing and then keeps talking anyway. The pratfalls get the attention, but the technique is in that visible flicker of calculation before the recovery, and it is why she can play a woman who is vain, needy and selfish without the audience ever wanting her off the screen.

Film has used her more narrowly: Lisa Kramer in Along Came Polly, Mary Klein in The Mothman Prophecies, Kat Ellis in The Wedding Date, parts that borrow the sitcom nerves without extending them. The sharper later work sits elsewhere, in the screen-life thriller Searching, where she is the detective on the case, and in Bros, where she plays herself. In between she carried two more NBC series, the Broadway musical drama Smash and the procedural comedy The Mysteries of Laura, and neither found the audience that the sitcom had. Nearly thirty years on, one character still accounts for most of why anyone knows the name, which is either a triumph or a trap depending on the day.