Rosemary Harris

Harris has been a stage actress for more than seventy years and a screen actress in the gaps. The awards tell that story: a Tony, an Emmy, a Golden Globe, three Olivier nominations, an induction into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1986, and a Tony for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre in 2017. The oldest film on her page is Beau Brummell from 1954. The most recent is from 2015.

Because the theatre always came first, the screen work is a scattering of very good small performances rather than a career shape. She is the Player Queen in Branagh's Hamlet, Berta Weiss in Holocaust, a grandmother in The Gift, an author in Crossing Delancey, a mother in Being Julia. Tom and Viv, where she plays the mother of T. S. Eliot's wife, brought her an Academy Award nomination and is the closest the cinema ever came to using her properly.

Then, in her mid-seventies, she became one of the most recognisable faces in the world. Sam Raimi cast her as May Parker across three Spider-Man films and she plays the part completely straight, as an old woman with a mortgage, a temper and a habit of delivering the thematic line without appearing to notice it is thematic. It is a small miracle of dignity inside a blockbuster, and it is what most people now know her for.