Elisha Cuthbert

Cuthbert was a working performer in Canada as a child, an extra on Are You Afraid of the Dark? and then a co-host of Popular Mechanics for Kids, which is a strange apprenticeship and a useful one: presenting teaches you to be watchable while nothing much is happening. Her first lead came in Airspeed in 1998, and Lucky Girl in 2001 brought her a Gemini.

Then 24 arrived and handed her a role she could not entirely win. Kim Bauer was written as the thing that goes wrong in her father's day, and the early seasons in particular treated her as a plot device with legs. The internet has been unkind about it ever since, mostly to the show's account rather than hers. What she did next was shrewd: The Girl Next Door and House of Wax made her a genuine teen-movie draw, and Old School had already shown she could land a joke.

Horror took a chunk of the middle years, Captivity most notoriously, and then the real turn came on television again. Alex Kerkovich in Happy Endings reframes the whole career, a broad, silly, fully committed comic performance in one of the best-liked American sitcoms of its decade, and nothing about it resembles the actor from 24. Since then she has worked at her own pace: The Ranch, the Irish horror The Cellar, the crime picture Bandit, the true-crime drama Monster in the Family.