Mae Whitman

Whitman has been working since she was a small child. She did commercials, made her film debut at six in When a Man Loves a Woman, and was on screen constantly through the late 1990s in One Fine Day, Independence Day as the president's daughter, and Hope Floats, then years on Chicago Hope and JAG. Almost nobody makes that transition intact. The reason she did is that she was never a cute child actor: the voice is low and a little hoarse, and she has always sounded like somebody thinking.

That voice built a second career. She was cast as Katara in Avatar: The Last Airbender while still a teenager and carried the emotional spine of an animated series that has outlasted most of the live-action drama of its era. She has been Tinker Bell across the Disney Fairies films, Amity in The Owl House, April in the 2012 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Wonder Girl in Young Justice and Rose in American Dragon: Jake Long. Very few actors have that much reach with children and teenagers.

On camera her best work is Amber Holt in Parenthood, a teenager whose defiance is thin cover for panic, played across the whole run with a total absence of vanity. Ann Veal on Arrested Development is the opposite trick: a character written to be unmemorable, which Whitman plays so sincerely that the joke never curdles into cruelty. Then Roxy in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Mary Elizabeth in The Perks of Being a Wallflower, the lead in The DUFF, and Annie in Good Girls, which finally handed her an adult part with real mess in it.