Karin Konoval

Vancouver shoots a great deal of American genre film and television, and for thirty years Konoval has played its witches, crones, severe mothers and unsettling neighbours: Billy's mother in Black Christmas, the Wicked Witch in Tin Man, a crone in a television Snow White, Morbidda Destiny in The Baby-Sitters Club, plus doctors and store managers and teachers in whatever else was filming that month.

Running alongside all of that is Maurice. She played the orangutan in all three rebooted Planet of the Apes films through performance capture, which means the warmth audiences remember is entirely hers and none of it reaches them through her own face. Maurice is the moral centre of that trilogy: the character who is kind first, who teaches, who stays. Building that out of a body shaped nothing like yours, in a species not known for readable expressions, is a harder acting problem than most leading roles, and she solved it three times.

Television has given her the steadier work lately, with recurring parts as Dr. Pelton on Snowpiercer and Deena Petringa on The Good Doctor, alongside the lead role of Mary Leonard in Cable Beach. She is one of those actors a certain kind of viewer recognises instantly without ever having learned the name.