Juliette Lewis

Lewis was eighteen when Cape Fear opened, and Danielle Bowden is still the best short argument for her: a teenager flirting with a man she should be running from, played with a wobbly, unguarded honesty no adult actor would have risked. It brought an Academy Award nomination and set the pattern for the decade that followed.

Her specialty is characters who want things too openly. Becky in What's Eating Gilbert Grape, Adele in Kalifornia, Mallory in Natural Born Killers, Kate in From Dusk Till Dawn: young women with no social armour, which in the early 1990s made her the face of a particular strain of American independent film. She is not a subtle actor and has never pretended to be one. What she has instead is nerve, and nerve is rarer.

She works as a singer and musician too, and the film career has run in bursts around the music. The later stretch is quieter and better than its reputation, taking in Iron Maven in Whip It, the flighty younger sister in August: Osage County, and a long run of dark supporting parts. Yellowjackets, where she plays the adult Natalie, has given her the best sustained role of her career, a woman whose damage is thirty years old and still not finished with her.