Elizabeth Hurley

Modeling came first and stayed alongside the acting for the whole career. Hurley was working in film before she was famous, in the opera anthology Aria in 1987 and the thriller Kill Cruise in 1990, and the fame arrived from the fashion side rather than from a breakout performance.

What she is good at is a specific and undervalued thing: playing the composed woman standing next to a comic engine, without competing with it. Vanessa Kensington in the two Austin Powers films is the job done properly. Mike Myers is doing six things at once and the scene only lands because someone in it is reacting like a person. Bedazzled asked for the opposite and got it. As the Devil she is the comic engine, she carries every scene she is in, and she plays the part with a straight face that makes the costumes funnier.

Television took over later, and it suited her. Queen Helena in the E! series The Royals gave her a lead built entirely out of poise and malice, Diana Payne arrived in the fifth season of Gossip Girl, and she turned up as Morgan le Fay in Runaways. The rest of the record is a working actor's record: Passenger 57 and EDtv and Serving Sara in the studio years, the Sharpe films as Lady Farthingdale, and more recently Christmas comedies and small genre pictures such as The Piper and Strictly Confidential. She is not a critics' actress and has never pretended to be one.