Helena Bonham Carter

Helena Bonham Carter arrived fully formed in the mid-1980s heritage-film boom, playing Lucy Honeychurch in A Room with a View and the title role in Lady Jane, and was immediately filed under English rose: corseted, virginal, decorative. She has said the label made her uncomfortable, and the two decades that followed read as a sustained argument against it. Howards End and a 1990 Hamlet kept her in the period drawing rooms, and her first Academy Award nomination, for The Wings of the Dove in 1997, came for a woman quietly arranging other people's lives for money.

What she is actually good at is playing damage without asking you to pity it. Marla Singer in Fight Club is the hinge: a performance built out of cigarette smoke and boredom, funny and genuinely unwell, with none of the winking the role invites. She does the same thing at higher volume as Mrs Lovett in Sweeney Todd, a woman who is cheerful about atrocity, and as Bellatrix Lestrange across four Harry Potter films, where she found something childlike and delighted in a character written as pure menace.

The long gothic run hardened into a house style, all pale skin and backcombed hair, and the parts began to blur into one another: a Red Queen, a corpse, a chocolatier's mother. Then The King's Speech reset everything. Her Queen Elizabeth is still, warm and almost invisible, and it won her a BAFTA and a second Oscar nomination. Since then she has been the best thing in a lot of ensembles, and her Princess Margaret in The Crown is the sharpest of the late work: a woman with nothing to do and far too much intelligence for it.