Frances Fisher

Frances Fisher was born in England and built her career in American theatre before television found her. From 1976 to 1981 she played Detective Deborah Saxon on the ABC soap The Edge of Night, five years of daily work that teaches an actor speed and not much else. Film came later and slower, which is why her best parts arrived when she was in her forties.

She is a specialist in women who have decided something and will not be talked out of it. In Unforgiven she is Strawberry Alice, the woman who puts the bounty on the table and then has to live with what she has set moving, and the performance is all suppressed fury and practical arithmetic. In Titanic she took the harder assignment: Ruth DeWitt Bukater, a mother selling her daughter into a marriage to save the family, played without a single bid for sympathy. Ruth is a snob and a coward, and Fisher makes her neither stupid nor evil, only frightened of poverty in a way the film has no patience for.

Both of those films won Best Picture, which has done less for her billing than you would expect. She has spent the decades since as one of the most reliable supporting actors in American film and television: Mary Windsor in The Lincoln Lawyer, Elaine Flowers in The Kingdom, Barbara Schoenberg in Woman in Gold, a lead run on ABC's Resurrection from 2014 to 2015, and Jane Crawford in HBO's Watchmen. It is a narrower career than a leading one would have been, and she is better than most of the leads she has supported.