Radha Mitchell

Radha Mitchell began on Australian television, playing Catherine O'Brien on Neighbours in 1996 and 1997, then left for Hollywood almost immediately. Her first real notice came from the 1998 independent film High Art. She holds an FCCA Award and has been nominated for AFI, Fangoria Chainsaw and Screen Actors Guild awards, a spread that tells you exactly how mixed her career has been.

What she does better than the material usually deserves is competence under collapse. Her characters are professionals whose situation is disintegrating, and she plays them without ever bidding for sympathy. Carolyn Fry in Pitch Black is the model: a pilot who makes a monstrous decision in the opening minutes and then spends the film earning her way back, and Mitchell refuses to soften a single beat of it. Rose in Silent Hill is the same steel pointed at motherhood, a woman walking deeper into a nightmare out of pure stubbornness.

The middle stretch put her opposite big male leads and asked for less: Phone Booth, Man on Fire, Surrogates, The Crazies, and both Olympus Has Fallen and London Has Fallen as Leah, married to the Secret Service agent doing the shooting. There were better things scattered among them, including Mary Ansell Barrie in Finding Neverland and a lead in the Australian creature feature Rogue.

The honest part is that the roles never scaled with the ability. A lot of the 2010s went into small thrillers with straight-to-streaming release patterns. She has since gone back to Australian work, with the series Troppo and the film Blueback, which is where her interesting recent performances are.