Maggie Grace

Maggie Grace was born Margaret Grace Denig in 1983 and grew up in Worthington, Ohio. Her first real notice came in 2002, in a television movie where she played Martha Moxley, a real fifteen-year-old murder victim, and it earned her a Young Artist Award nomination. Two years later she was cast as Shannon Rutherford on Lost, a main cast member for the first two seasons, and shared in the ensemble's Screen Actors Guild Award.

Shannon was the useful key to what she does well. On paper the character is a spoiled step-sister with a suitcase full of the wrong clothes, and Grace played her as somebody performing entitlement rather than possessing it, with the panic showing at the seams. She is good at that gap: the confident surface and the thing underneath that has not been dealt with.

She left the island wanting film work, got The Jane Austen Book Club, and then got Taken, which defined the next six years. Kim Mills is the daughter whose abduction is the engine of the plot, and Grace played her across three films between 2008 and 2014. It made her enormously visible and offered her almost nothing to act.

The better adult work came back on television. Althea on Fear the Walking Dead is a journalist who keeps filming survivors after there is nobody left to broadcast to, a character built on curiosity rather than fear, and it is the most interesting thing on her resume since Lost.