Annie Ross

Ross was a singer first, and a significant one. As a third of Lambert, Hendricks & Ross she helped establish vocalese, the practice of writing lyrics to recorded instrumental solos and then singing them at the original tempo, which is exactly as difficult as it sounds. The critic Dave Gelly described her style as a kind of dreamy watchfulness that defines 1950s hip. The National Endowment for the Arts named her a Jazz Master in 2010.

The screen career that followed took some genuinely strange turns. She sings for Kitty Kellermann in Salon Kitty, hired for the voice rather than the face. She is Vera Webster, attached to the villain, in Superman III. Twice she plays Granny Ruth, keeper of a house of monsters, in Frank Henenlotter's Basket Case 2 and Basket Case 3, and she takes that material completely seriously, which is precisely why it works.

The best fit came late. Robert Altman cast her in Short Cuts as Tess Trainer, a jazz singer working a Los Angeles club through a film that keeps returning to her stage, and the part lets her do both jobs at once: she performs the songs, and the performance is the character. Around it sit smaller things, a part in Throw Momma from the Train, the school principal in Pump Up the Volume, a Red Cross worker in Yanks, the residue of a performer perfectly happy to take the work.