Linda Hamilton

1984 handed her two horror leads: a Stephen King adaptation about murderous children, and a cheap science fiction film in which she played a waitress being hunted by a machine. The second changed the shape of her career and, eventually, of action cinema. Hamilton had been working since the late seventies in television and small pictures, and Sarah Connor was the first part written as a woman allowed to be terrified without becoming useless.

Terminator 2 is the performance, and it is worth being precise about why. She did not simply get formidable for it, though she did; she played a woman whose competence has cost her every social skill she had, and whose certainty has started to look a lot like the machines she is fighting. The film gives her a long scene in a suburban house belonging to a man she has decided has to be stopped, and she plays it without once asking to be liked. Very few sequels hand an actor that much, and fewer are repaid.

What followed was harder. Dante's Peak in 1997 is the biggest of her nineties films and the one where you can watch her doing solid work inside a disaster movie's paperwork. She stepped back after that and has returned in bursts: a spy mother on Chuck, Sarah Connor again in 2019 for Dark Fate, older and angrier and better than the film around her, a general on Resident Alien, and Dr. Kay in the fifth season of Stranger Things. Two Saturn Awards, three Golden Globe nominations and an Emmy nomination sit behind all of it.