Dorothy Atkinson

Atkinson's career has two spines. One is theatre, including a long association with the plays of Alan Ayckbourn. The other is Mike Leigh, who has cast her four times and at wildly different sizes: Jessie Bond in Topsy-Turvy, a silent passenger in All or Nothing, a singing weaver in Peterloo, and Hannah Danby in Mr. Turner, the performance that took her to Cannes in 2014 and earned a British Independent Film Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

The Leigh training shows in everything else. She builds people out of posture and small domestic gesture, working from the outside in, and she is entirely unafraid of being unglamorous or unlikeable, which in British television is rarer than it should be. It lets her move between period squalor and modern suburban comedy without changing method, and both come out observed rather than invented.

The television list is long and current: Florence Scanwell in Harlots, Mary Pennyworth in Pennyworth, Diana Brompton in All Creatures Great & Small, Sylvia Cook in Pistol, Jeannie Savage in The Gold, Betty Hoban in The Long Shadow, DCS Carol Shaw in Ludwig, Mrs. May in Joan, Pauline in Mum, and Lady Maria Coote in the coming Agatha Christie's Seven Dials. In film she was Paula Quick in Saltburn and Mrs. DuFrayne in The Electrical Life of Louis Wain. Decades of being one of the most reliably employed character actors in Britain is its own kind of verdict.