Jennifer Hudson

A televised singing contest put her on screen, and a musical about a singing group made her a film actor almost immediately. Hudson turned up on American Idol, did not win it, and then made her film debut as Effie White in Dreamgirls, a part that essentially asks a newcomer to stop a movie dead with one number and hold the audience there. She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for it, and her awards from that period also include the Golden Globe, the BAFTA and the Screen Actors Guild award in the same category.

The music career ran alongside it: a Grammy for Best R&B Album, then a long stretch where the singing was more reliable than the scripts. In 2022 she completed the EGOT, the youngest woman and the third African American to hold all four of the major American entertainment awards. She was given a Hollywood Walk of Fame star in 2013, and Time named her one of its hundred most influential people in 2020.

The acting record is genuinely uneven, which is worth saying out loud. Winnie Mandela, Black Nativity and Sandy Wexler are hard to defend. Cats is a disaster and she is stranded in the middle of it, singing the show's one famous song inside a digital fur suit. Set against that: Rosaleen in The Secret Life of Bees, Angela Wright in Confirmation, Irene in Chi-Raq, and Aretha Franklin in Respect, where the singing is unimpeachable and the film around it keeps reaching for the standard biopic beats.

She now hosts her own daytime talk show, which has turned out to suit her better than most of the parts did.