David Kross

A small part in a 2002 German film got David Kross started, and then he mostly went back to school, taking film work only occasionally. That changed in 2008, when he played the young Michael Berg in The Reader, a part that put a teenager at the centre of a story about German guilt and required him to be present in some very exposed scenes. The same year he carried Krabat in the title role.

What followed is unusually coherent for an actor who never planned it. Kross keeps being cast as the ordinary German that the twentieth century happens to: Carl "Luz" Long in Race, Bert Trautmann in The Keeper, Gunter Wetzel in Balloon, three real men from three different corners of the same national history. He is well suited to it because he does not editorialise. He plays decency as a slightly stubborn thing rather than a virtue, which stops these films from becoming lectures.

The rest of the list moves between German and English-language production: Gunther in War Horse, the preacher in Age of Uprising: The Legend of Michael Kohlhaas, Eugen Gauss in Measuring the World, Louis XIV in Angelique, and more recent work in Into the White, Rising High, Prey, Confessions of Felix Krull and The World Will Tremble. The second international breakout that The Reader seemed to promise never quite arrived, and his strongest work has stayed at home.