Jaime King

Jaime King was a fashion model before she was an actress and the early film roles used her accordingly: the beautiful one at the party, the girlfriend, the sister. Blow gave her Kristina Jung, Pearl Harbor gave her a nurse, White Chicks made her one of the rival socialites. None of them asked much.

Sin City changed that. She plays Goldie and Wendy, twin sisters, in a film shot entirely against green screen in high-contrast black and white, where every actor is essentially performing inside an illustration. King is very good in it. Goldie is barely present and haunts the whole of Marv's story; Wendy has to be recognisably the same face doing something completely different. She came back for the sequel nine years later.

The most useful work now is television. Lemon Breeland on Hart of Dixie is a genuinely fine comic performance across four seasons, a small-town southern snob written as an obstacle and played as a person. Black Summer gave her the opposite: Rose, a mother crossing a collapsed country to find her daughter, in a series shot in long unbroken takes that leave an actor nowhere to hide. It is the best work of her career and almost nobody watched it.

The film work since has mostly been genre: a remake of My Bloody Valentine, two Escape Plan sequels, a run of low-budget action thrillers where she is the top-billed name. That is the honest version of a mid-career actor's working life, and she is never the problem in any of them.