Sienna Miller

Sienna Miller modelled first, in Italian Vogue and the 2003 Pirelli Calendar, and arrived as an actress in 2004 with two British films in the same year: Layer Cake, as the gangster's girlfriend, and Alfie, as one of the women the title character mistreats. Both parts are functions rather than characters and both got noticed anyway. Factory Girl followed in 2006 with Miller as Edie Sedgwick, then The Edge of Love in 2008 as Caitlin MacNamara, and a BAFTA Rising Star nomination the same year.

Then the tabloids took over and the work suffered for it. She played the Baroness in G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra in 2009 and stepped away from the screen for a while under press scrutiny, which is the polite version of what happened. The career she came back to is a better one, built on supporting parts in serious films where the assignment is to be the person the protagonist is failing: Taya Kyle in American Sniper, Nancy Schultz in Foxcatcher, Nina Fawcett in The Lost City of Z.

She is very good at this, and it is a strange skill to be good at. The wife-and-widow role is usually a hole in a film, and Miller fills it by playing impatience rather than devotion. Her Taya Kyle is furious at least as often as she is frightened. Her Nina Fawcett has clearly thought harder about the expedition than the man leading it. The strongest recent work has been on television, where there is room to be less sympathetic, and in American Woman, where she carries an entire film, ageing across years, as a woman whose daughter has vanished.