Kristen Stewart

Kristen Stewart was born in Los Angeles in 1990 and was working on film sets as a child. She plays Jodie Foster's diabetic daughter in Panic Room at eleven, a genuinely demanding piece of acting, and she is the least mannered thing in the movie. By the time Twilight cast her as Bella Swan she had already done Into the Wild and a run of small dramas, but the vampire films swallowed the next five years and handed her a public reputation, hostile and heavily gendered, that had very little to do with what she was doing on screen.

What she is good at is withholding. Most film actors push an emotion outward for the camera; Stewart plays people who are working something out privately and would rather you looked away. Read impatiently that comes across as flatness. Watched properly it is one of the more honest registers in American film, and the directors who use it on purpose get her best work: the assistant in Clouds of Sils Maria who is smarter than her employer and knows better than to say so, the medium in Personal Shopper waiting for a message she may be inventing.

Her career after the franchise is one of the cleanest deliberate pivots any young star has made. She went to European auteurs and small American films instead of taking the next tentpole, and it worked. She has a British Academy Film Award and a Cesar, the French academy's prize, which is a rare thing for an American actress, and her Academy Award nomination came for playing Diana in Spencer, a role that could have been an impression and instead is a study of someone quietly coming apart. She now works both sides at once, genre pictures and micro-budget films, and has moved into directing.