Kim Wayans

Wayans made her television debut as Allison in the first season of A Different World, but the show that defined her was In Living Color, where from 1990 to 1993 she built a gallery of characters inside a sketch series moving at speed and taking no prisoners. She followed it with three years as Tonia Harris on the sitcom In the House, from 1995 to 1998.

She is a broad comic performer with unusually precise control of pitch. The family comedies use her as the fixed point that the chaos happens around: Mrs. Johnson in Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood, Diane in A Low Down Dirty Shame, the nightclub singer in I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, Latisha in Juwanna Mann, a spectacularly unbothered teacher in Dance Flick. It is a specific skill, holding a straight line while a parody detonates around you, and she is better at it than the films usually deserve.

The turn came in 2011. Pariah cast her as Audrey, the mother of a teenage daughter she cannot afford to understand, and Wayans played her with no comic release valve at all: no timing, no wink, just a woman holding a family together with a grip that is slowly crushing it. The performance drew two Black Reel Award nominations and an NAACP Image Award nomination in 2012 and reset what people thought she could do. Dramatic television has followed, including Vi Briggs on Reckless.