Kimberly Scott

Kimberly Scott came to film from the stage, with a Tony nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Play for the 1988 production of Joe Turner's Come and Gone. Born in Kingsville, Texas in 1961, she landed her first substantial screen role almost immediately after: Lisa "One Night" Standing, part of the underwater rig crew in James Cameron's The Abyss (1989).

Then came a run that deserves more attention than it gets. Joel Schumacher cast her five times between 1990 and 1997: Winnie Hicks in Flatliners, Detective Jones in Falling Down, Doreen in The Client, and then both of his Batman films, as Margaret in Batman Forever and an observatory associate in Batman & Robin, playing different characters each time. A director does not keep re-hiring an actor across seven years by accident.

What she is good at is a particular and undervalued thing: making institutional authority sound like a person. The nurse, the detective, the sergeant, the coroner, the caseworker. These parts are usually four lines of exposition delivered to a panicking lead, and Scott plays them as somebody who has done this job all week and will do it again tomorrow. Joyce Trexler in K-PAX, Gertie in I Am Sam, Sergeant King in World Trade Center, a coroner on Medium.

The work has stayed constant across four decades, from MacGyver through Love & Other Drugs and Respect, plus a recurring role on the CBS sitcom Bob Hearts Abishola.