Kate Nelligan

A stage actress who visited the screen, and a screen that never quite worked out what to do with her. The Canadian actress was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for The Prince of Tides in 1991, won the BAFTA for Best Actress in a Supporting Role the same year for Frankie and Johnny, and has been nominated for four Tony Awards on Broadway, for Plenty, A Moon for the Misbegotten, Serious Money and Spoils of War. That is a formidable record, and it is concentrated almost entirely in theatre and in one extraordinary twelve-month stretch.

Her screen persona is severity with something moving underneath it. Lila Wingo Newbury in The Prince of Tides, Olive Worthington running the orchard in The Cider House Rules, Constance in How to Make an American Quilt: mothers and matriarchs whose disapproval organises the room, played without ever asking the audience to like her for it. Directors cast her when a scene needed a woman who would not soften on cue.

The earlier work is more varied than the reputation suggests. She was Mercedes in a 1975 Count of Monte-Cristo, Lucy Seward in the 1979 Dracula, Lucy in the wartime thriller Eye of the Needle, and she took the title role in Eleni. Later came character parts in studio pictures, U.S. Marshals and Up Close & Personal among them, before she largely stepped away.