Janine Turner

Janine Turner was working a long time before she was famous, in soap opera and bit parts: Another World, Mr. Merlin, a cameo in Young Doctors in Love, a season of The Master. Steel Magnolias and Monkey Shines got her into films at the end of the eighties without making her a lead.

Northern Exposure did that. From 1990 to 1995 she played Maggie O'Connell, the Alaskan half of a slow-burn argument with a New York doctor who did not want to be there, and the show worked because neither of them was written as the reasonable one. Turner's contribution was refusing to make Maggie likeable on demand, which is why the character has aged better than most romantic foils of that decade. Cliffhanger followed in 1993, opposite Sylvester Stallone, and it remains the biggest film on her list.

The second half of the career has been steadier than glamorous: Dr. Dana Stowe on Strong Medicine in the early 2000s, Katie McCoy on Friday Night Lights, Dorothy Chambliss in Dr. T & the Women, June Cleaver in the 1997 Leave It to Beaver. Since then she has worked largely in faith-oriented and family pictures, Birthright Outlaw and Taking the Reins among them, alongside a second career as an author and public speaker and as founder and co-chair of Constituting America.