Christine Lakin

Lakin grew up on television as Al Lambert on Step by Step, across that sitcom's whole run on ABC and then CBS. It is the credit everyone knows and the least interesting thing about her working life.

What she built afterwards is the more instructive story: a career assembled out of the jobs that keep a working actor employed rather than famous. She voices Joyce Kinney on Family Guy. She played Joan of Arc in the film of Reefer Madness, the musical that takes the old anti-drug scare picture seriously enough to sing it. She was Craig Kilborn's on-air sidekick on The Kilborn File. She has turned up in the ensemble holiday films Valentine's Day and New Year's Eve, in Disney family comedies including The Game Plan and Race to Witch Mountain, and in five Swan Princess sequels, voicing Bridget in most of them and Queen Uberta in another.

She also directs. Taken together it is an unusually clear portrait of the modern jobbing performer: comedy timing, a voice that books, a willingness to take the animated sequel and the small independent film in the same year, and enough range that the child-star label stopped meaning anything a long time ago. There is no single towering credit in the list, and there does not need to be. Forty-odd screen jobs is its own kind of achievement, and very few people who were on a 1990s family sitcom are still this busy.