Jayne Atkinson
Jayne Atkinson is an actor, born 1959.
Bournemouth-born and thoroughly American on screen, Atkinson has built a career out of institutional authority: section chiefs, secretaries of state, officials with a title and a finite amount of patience. The stage came first and never left the performance. Her Tony-nominated roles in The Rainmaker and Enchanted April are nominations rather than wins, and the theatre training shows in how she handles a long speech without hurrying it.
Television is where most people found her. She played Karen Hayes on 24, BAU section chief Erin Strauss on Criminal Minds, and Secretary of State Catherine Durant on House of Cards, three parts that share a specific difficulty: each exists mainly to say no to the protagonist. Atkinson is very good at playing competence that is losing anyway, someone correct on the merits and outranked in the room, and she never asks the audience to pity her for it.
Her film work has been quieter and warmer. Two Free Willy pictures as foster mother Annie Greenwood, the wish-fulfilment comedy Blank Check, one of the elders in M. Night Shyamalan's The Village, and Recount, where she plays Theresa LePore, the Palm Beach County elections official whose ballot design became the most argued-over piece of paper of 2000. More recently she has turned up as Ruth Martin in Clarice and in the whodunit Death and Other Details.
Movies (8)
TV (9)
Where to start with Jayne Atkinson
Watch House of Cards for the fullest version of her. Catherine Durant spends the series doing constant arithmetic on what loyalty is worth, and the part rewards an actor who can keep a straight face through appalling information. 24 is the same instinct at a faster tempo, and Criminal Minds hands her the most thankless job on that show, the boss whose function is to disapprove.
For range, take Recount. Playing a real official caught in a national mess, she finds the exhaustion in it rather than the villainy, and it is the most sympathetic thing she has done.
The Village uses her stillness well. Free Willy is the softest title here and genuinely fond of her. Death and Other Details is a recent reminder that she can play arch when a show asks for it.
Women who run something
Her particular specialism: senior officials, chiefs and secretaries of state who are competent, political and never written as saints. She has played this in four separate long-running series and found a different kind of ambition in each one.
Films from the other career
Before the political roles she was a film actress, and this is the range: a Shyamalan village, two whale rescues that a whole generation grew up on, and a documentary drama about the Florida recount. Very little of it looks like the television work.