Jessica Hynes

For the first decade of her career Jessica Hynes worked under the name Jessica Stevenson, which is why her early credits look like somebody else's: The Baby of Macon, Pure, Confetti. Born in Lewisham, south London, in 1972, she co-created, co-wrote and starred in Spaced, playing Daisy Steiner, an aspiring writer whose main output is elaborate reasons not to write. It ran from 1999 to 2001 and has been quietly influential ever since.

Her specialism is people who are absolutely certain and completely wrong. Siobhan Sharpe, the brand consultant she plays in Twenty Twelve and W1A, is the definitive version: a woman whose vocabulary detached from meaning some years ago and who has not noticed. Yvonne in Shaun of the Dead is one joke, the mirror-image survival party led by someone visibly better at this than the heroes, and she plays it dead straight, which is the only way it lands. Cheryl in The Royle Family is the same instinct pointed at something sadder.

She is not confined to comedy. Edith Lyons in Years and Years is a furious activist and the moral engine of the series, and she plays it with no comic safety net at all. The rest of the CV is the busy British working life: Magda across two Bridget Jones films, Miss Kitts in Paddington 2 and Paddington in Peru, Mary Proudfoot in Son of Rambow, Nativity 2, Life After Life, The Franchise, Death of a Unicorn, and a detective inspector in Patience.