Glynn Turman

Turman was twelve when he appeared in the original 1959 Broadway production of A Raisin in the Sun, which means his career is older than most of the institutions that now employ him. Television followed, including Peyton Place from 1968, and then Cooley High in 1975, where his Leroy Jackson gave a generation of Black coming-of-age film its reference point.

What he does better than almost anyone is play authority that has already made its compromises. Mayor Clarence Royce on The Wire is the definitive version: a politician who knows exactly what he is trading and how much it is worth, delivering bad news with warmth because the warmth is part of the transaction. He won a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actor for In Treatment, playing a man in a therapist's office who will not sit still for the process. On A Different World he was Colonel Brad Taylor for five seasons, a maths professor with a soldier's posture, and that mix of discipline and dry humour has followed him ever since.

The late run has been extraordinary. Toledo in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is a band member who reads books and pays for it socially, and it is the best thing in the film after the two leads. He was A. Philip Randolph in Rustin, Chiron in Percy Jackson and the Olympians, and before all of that he was in Gremlins and Super 8 and Deep Cover, which is why viewers who think they have never seen him have seen him repeatedly.