Dolly Parton

Parton was a songwriter before she was a star and has never really stopped being one. Her debut album, Hello, I'm Dolly, came out in 1967, and the six decades since have produced roughly fifty studio records and a shelf of Grammys spanning country vocals, bluegrass, and collaborations with other artists. The music is the spine of everything else, and it explains the acting career better than any casting logic could.

Hollywood put her in a film in 1980 and she was immediately good at it. In Nine to Five she plays Doralee Rhodes, an office worker treated as decoration by a boss who has badly misjudged her, and she wrote the theme song that gave her 1980 album its title. What she does on screen is a controlled trick: she plays a version of the public Dolly Parton, all warmth and quick comebacks, and times it so precisely that audiences mistake the performance for no performance at all. Steel Magnolias is the proof. Truvy runs the beauty shop where the whole film happens, and Parton keeps the comic rhythm going while much heavier things move around her.

The rest is varied and honest about its own quality. The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas gave her a musical worth her voice, Rhinestone did not, and Straight Talk and Joyful Noise are pleasant vehicles built to her specifications. She has voiced cartoons, played Aunt Dolly on Hannah Montana, fronted her own anthology series in Heartstrings, appeared as an angel in a Christmas musical, and turned up as herself so often that it counts as a genre.