Emily Browning

Australian television had her on the payroll years before film did. She debuted in the 1998 TV movie The Echo of Thunder, then worked through the local industry's standbys, High Flyers, Something in the Air, Blue Heelers, the kind of steady series work most child performers never convert into anything else. The conversion arrived twice inside three years: Ghost Ship in 2002, a horror picture that put her in front of an audience outside Australia, and then Violet Baudelaire in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, which won her the Australian Film Institute International Award for Best Actress in 2005.

What she does better than almost anyone her age is contained alarm. Violet is played tired and capable rather than plucky, a child quietly doing arithmetic on the adults in the room, and that watchfulness is the quality casting kept buying. It also made her useful to films that mostly wanted a young woman to be looked at. Sucker Punch, Sleeping Beauty and Pompeii all build on somebody's gaze, and she is markedly better in the ones that know that is what they are doing.

The rest of the filmography is stranger and more interesting than the blockbusters suggest. Legend gave her Frances Shea, the woman at the edge of a gangster story, opposite Tom Hardy. Magic Magic and Plush pushed her into unstable, genuinely uncomfortable territory. American Gods handed her Laura Moon, the most abrasive and least likeable part she has had, and she plays it without a single bid for sympathy. Since then the work has moved smaller: Golden Exits, Monica, and the Australian comedy series Class of '07.