Patsy Kensit

Patsy Kensit was working before she was ten. Born in Lambeth in 1968, she was a child actor first, familiar to British audiences from a run of Birds Eye frozen pea commercials, and she was already on screen as a small child in The Great Gatsby in 1974, playing Pamela Buchanan, with Hennessy, The Blue Bird and Hanover Street following through the rest of the decade.

The second career was pop. In 1983 she formed Eighth Wonder and fronted the band until it broke up in 1989, scoring top-20 hits with "I'm Not Scared" and "Cross My Heart". The two careers fed each other exactly once, and spectacularly: Absolute Beginners in 1986 cast her in a musical set in 1950s London, which is about as neat a convergence as an English pop star could hope for.

Then Hollywood, briefly. Lethal Weapon 2 put her opposite Mel Gibson in a very large American sequel in 1989, and what followed was mostly genre: the horror thriller Full Eclipse, the action picture Timebomb, the Victorian literary adaptation Angels and Insects, the pop-industry period piece Grace of My Heart. None of it converted into a durable American career, and the wattage of the Lethal Weapon moment turned out to be the peak rather than the launch.

What lasted was British television. Holby City gave her a long-running hospital role, and she has kept turning up in domestic drama since, McDonald & Dodds among the recent ones.