Dianne Wiest

Dianne Wiest has two Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actress and both of them came from Woody Allen films, which is an awkward sentence to write now and an accurate one. Hannah and Her Sisters in 1986 and Bullets Over Broadway in 1994 are the wins; The Purple Rose of Cairo, Radio Days and September fill in the rest of that long collaboration.

What she does is play warmth with a fault line running through it. Wiest's characters are almost always kind, and the performance is usually about what the kindness is costing. Peg in Edward Scissorhands is an Avon saleswoman who brings home a boy with blades for hands because it did not occur to her to do anything else, and the film only works because Wiest treats that as ordinary behaviour. The same is true of Lucy in The Lost Boys and of Vi Moore in Footloose, the preacher's wife who is the only adult in town willing to change her mind.

She took an Oscar nomination for Parenthood in 1989, an Emmy in 1997 for Road to Avonlea and a second in 2008 for In Treatment, which is the most impressive of the four trophies because the part is almost entirely listening.

The late career has been generous to her. Aunt Jet in Practical Magic, the mother in Rabbit Hole, a bewildered actor in Synecdoche, New York, a wealthy woman in the sights of a guardianship scam in I Care a Lot, Clint Eastwood's estranged wife in The Mule, Lorraine in Only Murders in the Building. She works constantly, usually for one or two scenes, and those tend to be the scenes people remember.