Tamsin Greig

Radio built the foundation. She played Debbie Aldridge in The Archers on BBC Radio 4, a job that runs for years rather than seasons, while the television work assembled itself around it: Lamia in Neverwhere, then Fran in Black Books, then Dr. Caroline Todd in Green Wing, which is where most British viewers first registered the face.

What she is exceptionally good at is playing intelligent women being worn down, without ever asking the audience for sympathy. Caroline Todd is a competent doctor who cannot complete a sentence in a building full of lunatics. Beverly Lincoln in Episodes is a writer watching her own work destroyed with enormous politeness, and the comedy comes from her holding the line rather than cracking. Jackie Goodman in Friday Night Dinner is the only adult in a house of grown men who behave like boys, and the performance is all containment. The pattern is consistent and it is rarer than it looks: most comic actors play frustration as escalation, and she plays it as endurance.

The dramatic work uses the same reserve. Elizabeth Wilmshurst in Official Secrets, Anne Trenchard in Belgravia, Lady Capulet in a filmed National Theatre Romeo and Juliet, Natasha Groves in Suspect, Cecilia Logan in the television Sexy Beast. The best demonstration of the range is Miss Bates in the 2009 Emma, a part written to be laughed at and played as something genuinely painful. She also turns up in unexpected corners, an episode of Inside No. 9, Miss Cripslock in Going Postal, a small role in Shaun of the Dead, and voice work in Revolting Rhymes and children's animation.