Janet McTeer

Janet McTeer trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and made her professional stage debut in 1984, and the theatre has never really let her go. An Olivier nomination for Best Newcomer arrived in 1986 for The Grace of Mary Traverse, and in 1997 her Nora in A Doll's House took both the Olivier and the Tony for Best Actress. Broadway called her back for Mary Stuart in 2009 and Bernhardt/Hamlet in 2019. Film brought two Academy Award nominations, for Tumbleweeds in 1999 and Albert Nobbs in 2011, and in 2008 she was appointed OBE for services to drama.

Screen work has mostly cast her as the person who has already decided how the evening ends. Helen Pierce, the cartel lawyer she played across two seasons of Ozark, is the clearest example: a woman who delivers a fatal instruction in the same register she would use to correct a billing error, and who is more frightening for the courtesy. The same control shows up in a different key as the restaurant critic in The Menu, where the joke is that she cannot stop performing connoisseurship even as the evening turns against her, and again as Jessica Jones's mother, a part that asks for maternal warmth and something that cannot be reasoned with in the same breath.

She works steadily rather than loudly. Period drama, prestige television, a house painter living as a man in nineteenth century Dublin in Albert Nobbs, and the occasional blockbuster paycheck in the Divergent sequels or the last Mission: Impossible. Very few actors move between those registers without the seams showing.