Helen Shaver

Two careers share this page. The actress came first: a stretch of Canadian pictures through the 1970s, then the lead in In Praise of Older Women in 1978, which won her a Canadian best-actress prize, and American work followed.

Most of that American work was genre, and she was reliably the most grown-up thing in it. The Amityville Horror, The Osterman Weekend, The Believers, The Craft, Tremors II: Aftershocks, then a run on the cable horror series Poltergeist: The Legacy. Her function in all of them is credibility. She responds to ridiculous events the way a competent adult would, and that restraint is the only reason the ridiculous events stay frightening. Give her real material and the difference is obvious. Desert Hearts, where she plays an East Coast academic waiting out a divorce in Reno and falling for a younger woman, is the performance the rest of the list gets measured against, and her few scenes opposite Paul Newman in The Color of Money are unshowy and exactly judged.

Then she moved behind the camera, and the credits here catch the turn mid-stride: acting in The Education of Max Bickford in 2001, directing Due East in 2002 and The Man Who Lost Himself in 2005. Most of her directing since has been episodic television, which this list does not carry. On the evidence of how long it has lasted, it is the steadier of the two jobs.