Denise Crosby

Denise Crosby is best known for a job she held mainly for one season. Cast as Security Chief Tasha Yar on Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1987, she appeared largely across the first year, and the series later brought her back as Sela, Yar's half-Romulan daughter, a solution only Star Trek could have arrived at.

She had been working for five years before that, mostly in small sharp parts: Sally in 48 Hrs. (1982), bit roles in two Pink Panther films where the character is simply called Denise, Enid in The Man Who Loved Women (1983), and Pat in Desert Hearts (1985), which is the best film on this list by a wide margin and the one that should have changed everything. She is Bing Crosby's granddaughter, a fact her biography always leads with and her career has never once relied on.

Afterwards she became a genre actor and is consistently better than the material deserves. Rachel Creed in Pet Sematary (1989) is the widest-seen, and she does more with it than the script asks; Landa in Miracle Mile the same year is the better performance in the better film. Then Dolly Dearest, Eliminators, Relative Fear, Mortuary, plus a decade of guest work.

In 1997 she produced and starred in Trekkies, a documentary about Star Trek fandom made ten years after she joined the series, and followed it with a sequel. The late television is her strongest: Deb Goldman on Ray Donovan and, in particular, Faye Richardson on Suits.