Madeleine Stowe

Stowe worked mostly in television before Stakeout in 1987, a police comedy in which she is the woman on the other side of the surveillance and has to play every scene twice, once for herself and once for the men watching her through a window. It is a better piece of work than the film around it.

The five years after that are the strongest run of her career and almost all of it is genre: Revenge, Unlawful Entry, The Last of the Mohicans, Blink, Short Cuts, Bad Girls, China Moon, Twelve Monkeys. What she brought was intelligence held slightly in reserve. She is unusually good at watching a scene before joining it, and the directors who noticed built her parts around her attention rather than her dialogue. Cora in The Last of the Mohicans holds the screen without raising her voice; her psychiatrist in Twelve Monkeys anchors the film precisely because she is the one person visibly doing the thinking. The critics' prize she won was for Short Cuts, where she is one strand of a very large ensemble.

Then the filmography thins sharply. After The General's Daughter, We Were Soldiers and Impostor there is a long gap with almost no leading work in it, until Revenge brought her back to television in 2011 as Victoria Grayson, a part written as pure soap villainy and played with far more control than the writing needed. She has taken occasional character work since, including Ingrid Kersh in IT: Welcome to Derry. The gap is the first thing you notice, and the work on either side of it is good enough to make that a shame.