Monica Bellucci

Monica Bellucci was a fashion model, for Dolce & Gabbana and Dior among others, before she was an actress, and the film industry never entirely stopped treating her as one. Her first widely seen role, one of Dracula's brides in Coppola's 1992 film, is a piece of imagery rather than a part. Malena, eight years later, is an entire film about a town looking at a woman, which is either a comment on her casting or an example of it.

She works in four languages and the good performances are mostly not in English. Irreversible, told in reverse and still one of the most punishing films of its decade, asked for something no glamour role does, and she delivered it. Brotherhood of the Wolf, The Apartment and the Italian domestic dramas show a comic and melancholic register Hollywood never bothered to book. What Hollywood booked was the icon: Persephone in the Matrix sequels, a queen inside a mirror, a widow in Spectre, parts where the job is to arrive, be looked at and leave.

She has taken the honours of a serious European career, a David di Donatello, a Globo d'oro, a Nastro d'Argento, with Saturn and Cesar nominations alongside them, and she has kept working well past the point where the industry usually stops offering. Recent credits include Tim Burton's Beetlejuice sequel and the thriller Memory, and there is a distinct late-career quality to the choices now: stranger, funnier, more willing to look ridiculous.