Margo Martindale

Margo Martindale spent two decades being extremely good in six minutes at a time. Born in Jacksonville, Texas, in 1951, she has a 1990s filmography that reads as a list of other people's films: Lorenzo's Oil, The Firm, Dead Man Walking, Marvin's Room, The Hours. In Million Dollar Baby she plays the boxer's mother, a woman without a single redeeming scene, and she refuses to soften her by even a degree, which is exactly what makes the film work.

Television eventually gave her the size she deserved. Mags Bennett on Justified is a matriarch running a Kentucky hollow on moonshine and total local authority, and Martindale plays her with a maternal warmth that never once lets you relax in her company. It won her a Primetime Emmy in 2011. Claudia on The Americans runs at the opposite temperature, a KGB handler whose menace is almost entirely administrative, and it brought two more.

She is the rare character actor who became famous for being a character actor. BoJack Horseman cast her as a heightened version of herself, credited as Character Actress Margo Martindale, and the joke only lands because the audience already recognises the type she embodies. She was nominated for a Tony in 2004, has kept a stage career running alongside the screen work, and now gets to be the reason people watch things: Your Honor, Sneaky Pete, August: Osage County, and a park ranger with the driest delivery in Cocaine Bear.