Minnie Driver

Minnie Driver had two releases in 1995 that pointed in opposite directions. Circle of Friends, an Irish coming-of-age film, made her name and gave her Benny Hogan, a young woman written with far more interior life than the genre usually allows. GoldenEye, the same year, gave her about three minutes as a Russian nightclub singer and a joke she plays perfectly straight.

Good Will Hunting followed, and Skylar is a harder part than it looks: she has to be the only person in the film unimpressed by the lead and still plainly in love with him. The role established what she does best, which is the woman carrying more spine than the script has budgeted for. Debi in Grosse Pointe Blank is a small-town radio DJ refusing to be charmed by a returning hitman. Dahlia in The Riches and Maya in Speechless are both mothers written as blunt instruments and played as people.

The voice is a separate career. She is Jane in Disney's Tarzan, Lady Eboshi in the English-language Princess Mononoke, and the Penguin in Batman: Caped Crusader, rewritten as a woman and performed with obvious relish. She records music of her own, and she plays the diva Carlotta in the 2004 Phantom of the Opera as a comic monster rather than a punchline.

Thirty years in, she works across British and American film and television without ever having settled into one industry's idea of her, which is probably why the range has stayed as wide as it has.