Jamie Bell

Jamie Bell was thirteen when he was cast in Billy Elliot and fourteen when it won him the BAFTA for Best Actor in a Leading Role, one of the youngest winners in the category's history. Child stardom on that scale usually ends badly. His did not, largely because he spent the following decade taking parts nobody would have chosen for a former ballet prodigy: a young marine in Flags of Our Fathers, a Bielski brother in Defiance, an enslaved Briton in The Eagle, St John Rivers in Jane Eyre.

He is a physical actor first, which is easy to miss because he never shows off about it. It is why performance capture suited him so well in The Adventures of Tintin, where the character is defined almost entirely by momentum, and why he is so convincing as men used to being underestimated. In Snowpiercer he plays a follower rather than a leader and gives the film a good deal of its warmth. In Filth he is the junior officer who cannot quite work out how bad his colleague has become.

The most demanding recent work is the transformation stuff. Skin required him to play a man covered in white supremacist tattoos trying to leave that life behind, while Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool, which brought a second BAFTA nomination, asked for tenderness instead of intensity. He also played Bernie Taupin in Rocketman and Ben Grimm in the 2015 Fantastic Four, a film that did him no favours, and then quietly gave one of his best performances in All of Us Strangers.