Mamie Gummer

A very famous mother is an awkward inheritance: it gets you seen, then measured against a standard nobody applies to a stranger. Gummer, the daughter of sculptor Don Gummer and Meryl Streep, first appears in this filmography as a small child in Heartburn in 1986, and everything since has been built at a deliberate distance from that entrance.

The work is precise and slightly cool. She is unusually good at educated women being handled by somebody with more power, and at making the handling visible in a look rather than a line: Sally Smith Adams inside the sprawl of the John Adams miniseries, the aviator Jerrie Cobb in The Right Stuff, the pharmaceutical rep whose function in Side Effects is to be plausible enough to hold a plot together. She takes small parts and gives them a spine, which is why directors keep casting her in ensembles rather than at the centre of them.

The leads have been scarcer. Emily Owens, M.D. gave her a title role on The CW that lasted a single season, and her recurring turn as Nancy Crozier ran across The Good Wife and its spin-off, neither of which is among the credits listed here. The stage has treated her better, including a 2016 Drama Desk nomination for Ugly Lies the Bone. Recent television has kept using her well, most visibly as Carrie Sinclair in We Were Liars.