Penelope Ann Miller

Broadway came first. Miller was in the original run of Biloxi Blues from 1985, then repeated the work on screen in the 1988 adaptation, and picked up a Tony nomination for the revival of Our Town at the end of the decade. Film treated her as a discovery slightly later, after small parts in Adventures in Babysitting and Big Top Pee-wee.

Then came a run that would flatter any resume. Between 1990 and 1997 she was Tina Sabatini in The Freshman, Paula in Awakenings, Joyce Palmieri in Kindergarten Cop, Kate Sullivan in Other People's Money, Edna Purviance in Chaplin, Margo Lane in The Shadow and Dr Margo Green in The Relic. The Golden Globe nomination came for Gail in Carlito's Way, and it is the right choice: the role asks her to be the thing a career criminal is dreaming about while remaining a woman with her own accurate read on how this ends. She plays the second half, which is why the performance survives the film's romanticism.

The leading-lady window closed, as it tends to, and what she built afterwards is more interesting than the usual fade. She has become a specialist in real women: Edna Purviance, Mary Kay Letourneau, Joyce Mitchell, Joyce Dahmer, Nancy Reagan. These are parts that require an actor to hold their nerve while an audience arrives with a verdict already prepared, and she is unusually willing to play the unflattering version.

Alongside that sits steady work in ensembles, from The Artist to The Birth of a Nation to American Crime, the career of someone who never stopped.