Michael Sheen

Sheen built a stage career first and did it properly. RADA, then a decade on Romeo and Juliet, Peer Gynt, The Seagull, The Homecoming and Henry V, with Olivier nominations for Amadeus at the Old Vic, Look Back in Anger at the National and Caligula at the Donmar. Screen fame arrived late and in a very specific form.

For about ten years he was the best living portrayer of famous British men, and the trick was that he never really impersonated them. He played Tony Blair three times, including in The Queen, and went after the appetite rather than the accent. His David Frost in Frost/Nixon is a chat-show host desperate to be taken seriously. His Brian Clough in The Damned United is a man whose ego is the only thing holding him upright. In each case the likeness is a delivery system for something less flattering.

The other Sheen is a cheerful ham, and he is just as good at that: Lucian across three Underworld films, the powdered menace of Aro in the Twilight series, the White Rabbit in the Alice films, and Castor in Tron: Legacy, a performance running at roughly four times the voltage of the film around it. Television later gave him both registers at once, as Bill Masters in Masters of Sex and the angel Aziraphale in Good Omens. Very few actors can do prestige and pantomime in the same year without either one looking like a compromise.