Kerry Washington

For most of a decade Washington was the good actor in other people's films. She grew up in the Bronx, made her feature debut in the 2000 drama Our Song, and then took what came. She was Alicia Masters in the 2005 Fantastic Four and its sequel, Della Bea Robinson in Ray, Kay Amin in The Last King of Scotland and Broomhilda in Django Unchained: a run of parts defined by their proximity to a louder character.

Scandal changed the terms. Olivia Pope ran on ABC from 2012 to 2018 and asked her to carry every scene at high speed while playing a woman whose entire profession is control, which is a much harder combination than the show's plotting made it look. Two Emmy nominations came from it.

Her best work since has been in the register Scandal could not accommodate: quiet, contained, faintly cold. Confirmation asked her to play Anita Hill under hostile questioning and she declined every opportunity to editorialise. Little Fires Everywhere is the sharpest thing she has done, a performance assembled almost entirely out of withheld information. She holds a Primetime Emmy, two Golden Globe nominations and two Tony nominations, was on Time's 100 list in 2014, and by 2018 Forbes had her as the eighth highest-paid actress in television. These days she is as likely to be producing as starring.