Jane Seymour

Seymour's screen career starts with an uncredited teenage extra in the 1969 film Oh! What a Lovely War, passes through Pamela Plowden in Young Winston, and arrives properly in 1973 with Solitaire in Live and Let Die. That was the making of her and very nearly the trap. A Bond girl with a fortune-telling gimmick is not usually the beginning of a career still running fifty years later.

She got out of it by going where the parts were, which in the late 1970s and 1980s meant television. Serina in the original Battlestar Galactica, Princess Farah in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, Marguerite St. Just in The Scarlet Pimpernel, Marie Antoinette in The French Revolution, Natalie Henry across War and Remembrance. Her awards come from that side of the ledger and not the film side: an Emmy for supporting actress in a miniseries or movie, and two Golden Globes, one for a television film and one for a drama series.

Then Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman arrived in 1993 and made her a fixture in American living rooms for the rest of the decade. Michaela Quinn is played completely straight, with no irony whatsoever, which is exactly why it landed with the audience it found.

The late act is the funniest. Kathleen Cleary in Wedding Crashers uncovered a comic actress nobody had thought to cast, and Austenland, The Kominsky Method and a long run of romantic comedies followed. She now leads Harry Wild, a detective series, in her seventies, and shows no sign of slowing.