Jamie Lee Curtis

Curtis was cast as Laurie Strode in Halloween in 1978 and the genre claimed her immediately: Prom Night, Terror Train, The Fog and Halloween II all followed within four years, and the scream-queen label attached before she had any chance to argue with it.

She got out through comedy, which is the part of the career people still underrate. Trading Places, A Fish Called Wanda and True Lies are farce performances with real physical timing, and Freaky Friday works precisely because she commits without embarrassment to the silliest available premise. Very few actors move between horror and farce without softening one of them.

What she does best is competence coming apart. Laurie Strode ages across four decades from a babysitter into a woman who has organised her entire life around a threat nobody else believes in, and the later Halloween films are worth watching mostly for how unglamorous Curtis is willing to let that damage look. Her films have grossed over two and a half billion dollars, the bulk of it from a franchise she could have walked away from at any point.

The late run is the best of it. Linda Drysdale in Knives Out, Deirdre Beaubeirdre in Everything Everywhere All at Once, which brought the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, and Donna Berzatto in The Bear, a performance that turns a family dinner into a horror sequence. She is also a children's author, and she has an Emmy, a BAFTA and two Golden Globes. The remarkable thing is not the longevity, it is that she kept getting better.