Courteney Cox

Courteney Cox has spent forty years being the most competent person in the room and the least thanked for it. Family Ties gave her a recurring role in the late eighties, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective made her the straight woman opposite Jim Carrey at full volume, and then Friends arrived in 1994 and ran for a decade.

Monica Geller is the hardest of the six parts and the one that gets the least credit. She is the plot engine: neurotic enough to be funny, grounded enough that everyone else's chaos has something to land against. Cox took seven Screen Actors Guild nominations out of it and one win, and her wider record, two Emmy nominations, a Golden Globe nomination and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, is thinner than the work deserves.

The other franchise has outlasted the sitcom. Gale Weathers turned up in Scream in 1996 as a self-serving television reporter with no shame and worse hair, and Cox has played her in every film in the series since, through Scream 2, Scream 3, Scream 4, the 2022 reboot, Scream VI and the coming Scream 7. Very few actors get a thirty-year run in a single horror role, and she has quietly turned Gale from comic-relief vulture into the closest thing the series has to a spine.

Away from the two franchises she is more interesting than the credits suggest: Lucy Spiller, a tabloid editor with no floor, in Dirt; Jules Cobb in Cougar Town, which she carried for six seasons and directed episodes of; and Shining Vale, a horror comedy that finally lets her be strange. She runs Coquette Productions, founded with her then-husband David Arquette.