Geraldine James

James has spent more than forty years doing the thing British television does better than anyone: character work carrying the weight of a lead. The Jewel in the Crown made her name in 1984 as Sarah Layton, and she won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress for the television film She's Been Away. She was appointed OBE. Cinema found her early too, as Mirabehn in Gandhi in 1982.

She is exceptional at authority that has already counted the cost of itself. Milner in Utopia is the most frightening presence in a series full of graphic violence, and the reason is that she is unfailingly polite: no raised voice, no threat, just a woman explaining a decision that was taken some time ago. Marilla Cuthbert in Anne with an E works the same muscle in the opposite direction, severity as the only vocabulary a repressed woman has for love. Rose Garrity in Band of Gold and Connie in Made in Dagenham are working-class women played without a trace of condescension.

Later she became reliably regal. She is Queen Mary in Downton Abbey, Lady Ascot across two Alice films, Mrs. Hudson to Robert Downey Jr.'s Sherlock Holmes, and Mayor Ruth Jahns in Silo, a part that hands her a whole society's compromises to carry in a handful of scenes. Her small roles in 45 Years and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo are the ones to look for if you want to see how much she can do with four minutes.