Lauren Holly

Holly's run at film stardom lasted about five years and produced two performances people still quote. She had been working in television since the 1980s, on My Two Dads and then as Deputy Sheriff Maxine Stewart on Picket Fences, when Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story cast her as Linda Lee in 1993 and Dumb and Dumber cast her as Mary Swanson in 1994.

The second is the one everyone remembers, and it is a harder job than it looks. The comic engine of that film depends on a straight woman who is neither cruel nor stupid, who has to react to the two leads without ever commenting on them, and who has to stay plausible as the object of a fantasy that the film is simultaneously mocking. Holly holds all three at once and makes it look like nothing.

What followed has a familiar shape. Studio comedies and thrillers, Sabrina, Down Periscope, Beautiful Girls, Turbulence, Any Given Sunday, What Women Want, and then a move back to television, where NCIS gave her Director Jenny Shepard, a part with real authority, and Motive gave her Dr. Betty Rogers. Canadian production has kept her busy ever since, from Family Law and The Lake to a steady line of holiday romances. She is better than that circuit, and the proof is The Blackcoat's Daughter, a slow and genuinely unsettling horror film in which she does more with a handful of scenes than most of her studio comedies ever asked of her.