Shelley Long

Diane Chambers used vocabulary as a weapon and lost every fight anyway. Long committed to that character's pretension so completely that Cheers could be cruel to her without ever becoming mean, which is a harder trick than the show's reputation for effortlessness suggests. Five Emmy nominations came out of it, with the win in 1983 for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series, plus two Golden Globes. She returned to Diane for three episodes of Frasier, and picked up a further guest Emmy nomination for that.

While the sitcom was running she built a parallel film career, and it is a genuinely strange list: a cavewoman comedy in Caveman, the pragmatic love interest of Night Shift, the crumbling house of The Money Pit, the mismatched double act of Outrageous Fortune. Comedy of the 1980s tended to ask actresses to be reasonable while men were funny. Long refused the deal and played women who were ridiculous on their own terms.

Troop Beverly Hills in 1989 is the clearest distillation, a Beverly Hills divorcee leading a scout troop with total sincerity, and it has outlived most of the films that were better reviewed at the time. Later work has been fond rather than demanding: Carol Brady in the Brady Bunch films, and a long recurring run as DeDe Pritchett on Modern Family from 2009 to 2018.