Natalie Dormer

Natalie Dormer was the academic hopeful of her family in Reading: head girl, straight-A student, offered a place to read history at Cambridge until an A-level History grade went the wrong way. She auditioned for drama schools instead, trained at the Webber Douglas Academy in London, and made her screen debut in Casanova in 2005. Two years later she was Anne Boleyn on The Tudors, and the shape of her career was set.

Her particular gift is playing intelligence as something physical. The half-smile that recurs in her best work is not a mannerism, it is a device: it lets the audience see a character calculating while the people in the scene with her see only charm. Anne Boleyn is a political operator with an expiry date. Margaery Tyrell on Game of Thrones is the same instrument tuned finer, a woman who wins by making herself impossible to dislike, and Dormer plays the effort behind the likeability rather than the likeability itself.

Her accolades include an Empire Award, along with nominations for a Critics' Choice Award, two Gemini Awards and two Screen Actors Guild Awards. Since the two big franchises ended she has gone deliberately smaller and stranger: Cressida in the Mockingjay films, Irene Adler on Elementary, a Nazi-era shapeshifter in Penny Dreadful: City of Angels, and leads in independent films of wildly varying quality. The talent has never been in question. The material has.