Elizabeth Reaser

Elizabeth Reaser has spent her career working in two industries at once. In one she is a stage-trained character actress who turns up for a few episodes of the best American television of the last twenty years: Grey's Anatomy, Mad Men, The Good Wife, True Detective, The Handmaid's Tale. In the other she is Esme Cullen.

The Twilight films handed her five movies of a role with almost nothing written into it, a vampire matriarch whose function is to be kind, and she played it without a trace of condescension, which is more than the material was owed. It is worth being clear that the job was not a career mistake. It bought her the freedom to spend the rest of her time in independent films like Sweet Land, Young Adult and Liberal Arts, where she is usually the only adult in a story about people refusing to become one.

Her best work is in horror, and specifically for Mike Flanagan. Ouija: Origin of Evil, which had every reason to be a disposable sequel, gives her a widowed mother running a fake seance business, and she plays the grief absolutely straight while the film gets stranger around her. Two years later The Haunting of Hill House made her Shirley Crain, the sibling who copes by managing everyone's feelings except her own, and it is the performance her whole career had been rehearsing: precise, brittle and furious under a very controlled surface.