Kelly Reilly

Kelly Reilly worked steadily in British film and television for more than twenty years before the role that made her a household name in America, and that earlier career is worth knowing about. Caroline Bingley in Pride & Prejudice. The Wendy of Cedric Klapisch's trilogy, across The Spanish Apartment, Russian Dolls and Chinese Puzzle. Mary Morstan opposite Jude Law in both Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes films. A frightening lead in the British horror film Eden Lake, and a run of television leads in Above Suspicion, Black Box and Britannia.

Then Yellowstone. Beth Dutton is one of the most extreme characters on American television, a woman assembled almost entirely out of appetite and retaliation, and Reilly plays her with a control the writing does not always supply. The performance could easily be camp. It is not, because she keeps locating the specific injury under each cruelty, and because she delivers the show's most outrageous lines as though they cost her nothing at all.

She had been doing versions of this for years without the audience. Nicole in Flight is an addict written thinly and performed with real dignity. Jordan Semyon in the second season of True Detective is the best thing in a season nobody defends. Fiona in Calvary, a daughter visiting her priest father, is the quietest work she has done and possibly the finest. She now leads the Yellowstone spin-off Dutton Ranch, which suggests the second half of her career will be spent on that ranch, and on the evidence she can carry it.