Emily Watson

Watson came to film late and from the stage. She joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1992 and was still unknown when Lars von Trier cast her in Breaking the Waves (1996), a debut so exposed that it is hard now to believe it was anyone's first film. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for it, and again two years later for Hilary and Jackie, playing the cellist Jacqueline du Pre.

Her instrument is a kind of transparency. Watson does not appear to be acting so much as thinking, and the camera reads it without her doing anything to assist. That is why directors hand her the character whose face has to carry the film's argument: the scientist in Chernobyl who keeps asking the question nobody wants asked, the mother in Small Things Like These, Rosa Hubermann in The Book Thief, whose harshness turns out to be a form of care.

It also means she can play warmth without sugar. Punch-Drunk Love works because Lena is odd in the same key as Barry rather than a corrective to him. Red Dragon handed her a blind woman written as a victim and she played her as the only adult in the film. Even the paid work, in Kingsman: The Golden Circle, Everest and War Horse, gets a real person rather than a placeholder.

Chernobyl brought Emmy and Golden Globe nominations, and she has a British Academy Television Award for a leading role. Thirty years in she has never had an obvious career strategy, moving between Gosford Park, Synecdoche New York, The Theory of Everything, God's Creatures, Dune: Prophecy and Hamnet, and the filmography is considerably better for the lack of one.