Dyan Cannon

Dyan Cannon had been working since 1960, in television and in pictures like The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond, but the career people remember starts in 1969 with Alice Henderson in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, a comedy about two couples talking themselves into an open marriage. She was nominated three times for an Academy Award across the years that followed, and picked up a Golden Globe along the way.

What she does better than almost anyone of that era is nervous comedy. Her characters are usually the most highly strung person in the room, and she plays the strain rather than the punchline, letting the laugh come out of somebody trying very hard to hold themselves together. Heaven Can Wait is the perfect use of it, with Julia Farnsworth conspiring against her husband while performing wifely devotion at full volume. Deathtrap asks for something similar from Myra Bruhl. The Last of Sheila drops her into an ensemble of Hollywood people playing a cruel puzzle game on a yacht, and she is the funniest thing on the boat.

The eighties and nineties turned her into a comic supporting player, in Author! Author!, Caddyshack II, Out to Sea, 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag and Kangaroo Jack. Television then gave her a late run as Whipper Cone, the judge in Ally McBeal, which introduced her to an audience that had missed the first act entirely.