JoBeth Williams

JoBeth Williams spent the early 1980s in an improbable number of films people still talk about. Born in Houston in 1948, she broke through with a handful of scenes in Kramer vs. Kramer in 1979, followed them with Meredith in Stir Crazy in 1980, and then landed the role that fixed her in place: Diane Freeling in Poltergeist in 1982.

That performance is worth being specific about, because it is the reason the film works. Williams plays the first act as a woman who likes her house, likes her children and finds the early disturbances funny, and she plays it loose and unguarded. Nothing about her suggests a horror heroine, so when the picture turns, the terror registers as an ordinary person's terror rather than a genre performance. Very few actors are willing to be that relaxed on camera before the screaming starts. She returned to the part in Poltergeist II: The Other Side in 1986.

1983 gave her two more: Karen Bowens in The Big Chill, where she is part of an ensemble of disappointed adults and gets some of the sharpest material, and Nurse Nancy Bauer in The Day After, a television film about nuclear war. She is a three-time Emmy nominee, for the television film Adam, the miniseries Baby M and a guest turn on Frasier.

After that she worked steadily rather than spectacularly: Teachers, Bessie Earp in Wyatt Earp, comedies like Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot and Jungle 2 Jungle, the series The Client, and a long tail of parental roles in Fever Pitch, In the Land of Women, The Big Year and Private Practice.