Nathan Lane

Nathan Lane built his reputation in rooms with an audience in them. He came up on the New York stage, and the honors that define him are theater honors: three Tony Awards, seven Drama Desk Awards, a Laurence Olivier, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2006, and induction into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2008. In 2010 The New York Times called him the greatest stage entertainer of the decade, which is the sort of sentence that usually gets hedged and here did not.

What he does better than almost anyone is comic desperation. Lane plays men who are performing composure while visibly running out of it, and he can land a joke on the fifth beat, after everyone else has stopped waiting for one. The Birdcage is the clearest case. Albert is broad, loud and feathered, and Lane keeps finding the frightened person underneath the routine. MouseHunt runs the same engine at cartoon speed. Even as a voice, Timon in The Lion King works because the wisecracks are a defense mechanism with a rhythm.

Hollywood never quite worked out what to do with that. He has spent decades as the funniest person in other people's films, often for eight minutes, and long stretches of his screen career read as a series of guest appearances: Modern Family, Austin Powers in Goldmember, Mirror Mirror. Television eventually caught up. Teddy Dimas in Only Murders in the Building let him be genuinely unpleasant, and Beau Is Afraid handed him a part where the geniality itself was the threat. Three Emmy Awards and a Screen Actors Guild award suggest the industry got there in the end.