Alicia Witt

David Lynch found her as a child and cast her as Alia in Dune in 1984, then brought her back six years later as Gersten Hayward in Twin Peaks. That is an unusual pair of first credits, and it set a pattern: Witt has spent a career being the interesting person at the edge of other people's stories rather than the one on the poster.

The 1990s gave her the widest exposure. Four seasons on Cybill as Zoey Woodbine, the sitcom daughter with a sharper tongue than the format wanted; Gertrude Lang, the struggling clarinettist in Mr. Holland's Opus; Kiva in Four Rooms; the terrorised student at the middle of Urban Legend. She was also very good in the smaller, meaner films of that period, Citizen Ruth and Cecil B. Demented among them, where her particular quality shows best. She plays intelligence as a symptom. Her characters are usually the ones who have worked out what is happening a scene or two before anybody else, and are not necessarily better off for it.

The 2000s pushed her toward respectable supporting work, Libby in Vanilla Sky, June Carter in Two Weeks Notice, Kim Cummings in 88 Minutes, and then a long, steady television career: Rosalind Harker on The Mentalist, Wendy Crowe on Justified, Nicole on The Exorcist. She has also built a parallel life as a musician, which is the part of her that the acting credits never show.

Recently she turned up in I Care a Lot and in Longlegs, the horror film that reintroduced her to an audience that only knew the television version. It is the best thing she has done in twenty years.