Melissa George

Three years on an Australian soap is a strange apprenticeship, but it worked. George played Angel Parrish on Home and Away from 1993 to 1996, moved to the United States, and made her feature debut as May in Dark City in 1998, followed by small parts in The Limey and Mulholland Drive. That is an unusually good run of directors for someone barely out of Summer Bay.

Leading roles arrived with the 2005 remake of The Amityville Horror, and the decade that followed put her at the centre of genre pictures: Turistas, 30 Days of Night and Triangle, with Derailed alongside them. Horror is where she is best used, and the reason is temperamental rather than physical. She plays competence under pressure. Her characters are not screaming victims, they are people methodically trying to solve an unsolvable situation, which is why Triangle works at all: the film is a structural puzzle and it rests entirely on whether you believe she would keep trying.

Television has given her the more varied material. Lauren Reed on Alias, Laura Hill in In Treatment, Samantha Hunter in Hunted, Diane Hagerty in The First, Margot Fox in The Mosquito Coast. There is also a genuine oddity in the credits: she played Rosie in both the Australian version of The Slap in 2011 and the American remake in 2015, which is a rare thing for an actor to be asked to do and rarer still to accept.

The career has stayed transnational, moving between Australian films like Felony, European work including The Eddy, and American television, without settling anywhere for long.