Miranda Otto

Otto is the daughter of the actors Barry and Lindsay Otto and the half-sister of Gracie Otto, and she began working at eighteen, in 1986. Her first major film was Emma's War, playing a teenager moved out to the Australian bush during the Second World War, and she spent the decade after it shuttling between Australian independents and studio pictures without being pinned to either.

Peter Jackson's trilogy changed the scale. As Eowyn in The Two Towers and The Return of the King she plays resolve that visibly costs something: not a triumphant warrior but a woman boxed in by duty and grief who takes the only exit available to her. It is a performance built out of frustration, which is a harder note to hold than valour, and it is why the character landed with an audience that had no idea who she was.

A lot of her strongest work since has been in horror, a genre that uses her particular self-possession well. She is in Annabelle: Creation and Talk to Me, she plays Zelda Spellman across Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, and she had a small early part in What Lies Beneath. Homeland gave her Allison Carr, and The Thin Red Line gave her one of the few female roles in it.

She has kept a parallel career at home the entire time, in Australian film and television including In My Father's Den, The Daughter and The Clearing, and she returned to voice Eowyn for the animated The War of the Rohirrim.