Sheryl Lee

She was working in theatre in Seattle when David Lynch cast her, which is the sort of accident that shapes a career before an actor has any say in it. Twin Peaks made Laura Palmer the most looked-at face on American television in 1990, and Lee played her largely in photographs, home video and flashback, then took a second part on the same show, Maddy Ferguson, so the production could keep her on screen in the present tense.

What she did with the follow-up is the argument for her as an actor rather than an image. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me gave her a whole film in which to be a person instead of a memory, and she played terror, exhaustion and defiance at a pitch most performers would not survive. The film was dismissed on release in 1992 and is now treated as the most harrowing thing Lynch ever made, which is a reversal she is largely responsible for.

Then she stepped out of it. She went back to the stage, taking the title role in Salome on Broadway opposite Al Pacino, and built a screen career out of character parts rather than leads: Astrid Kirchherr in Backbeat, the two Noth sisters in Mother Night, a role for John Carpenter in Vampires, a small bruised part in Winter's Bone. She returned to Laura once more for Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces, the assembled outtakes from Fire Walk with Me, which is a strange sort of encore and a generous one.