Jennifer Lopez

Jennifer Lopez came out of the Bronx as a dancer, moved into acting, and then did something almost nobody manages: ran a top-tier music career and a studio film career at the same time, for decades. She is credited with breaking barriers for Latino performers in Hollywood and with helping push Latin pop into the American mainstream, and her influence on fashion and branding has outlasted several of the industries she works in.

Her strongest acting is early and unfussy. My Family, then Selena in 1997, then Out of Sight, where she plays a federal marshal opposite George Clooney and is completely his equal. The trunk sequence and the hotel bar scene remain the best evidence that she is a real screen actor whenever a director actually wants one. Anaconda and The Cell, from the same stretch, are ridiculous in different directions, and she is the only stable element in either.

The 2000s were the romantic-comedy decade, which made her enormously famous and progressively less interesting. The Wedding Planner, Maid in Manhattan, Monster-in-Law and Gigli are films built around a persona rather than a character, and she delivered the persona expertly. Hustlers in 2019 changed the conversation. As Ramona she is predatory, funny and entirely in command, and the film knows it has a physical performer who understands exactly what she is doing with a room. The streaming era has been kinder to her commercially than critically, with The Mother and Atlas trading on her as an action lead rather than as an actor.