Olivia Colman

Olivia Colman spent roughly a decade as a British comedy regular before anyone outside the country knew her name. She was Sophie in Peep Show, the office woman orbiting two awful men, and PC Doris Thatcher in Hot Fuzz, and she was reliably the funniest person in scenes she was not meant to dominate. Then Tyrannosaur in 2011 and Broadchurch in 2013 revealed a dramatic actor of frightening range, and the second half of the career happened very quickly.

The specific gift is that the comedy never leaves. Queen Anne in The Favourite is grotesque, needy, funny and genuinely tragic inside single scenes, and the Academy Award for Best Actress followed. Playing Elizabeth II in The Crown she made the least expressive woman in Britain readable, and took an Emmy and a Golden Globe for it. Her face does an enormous amount of work: she can register an insult landing while smiling straight through it.

She is now one of the busiest actors alive, and she spends that status oddly and well, taking small parts in animation and blockbusters and then vanishing into something like The Lost Daughter or Empire of Light. On the evidence of Wicked Little Letters and Fleabag she is also entirely happy to play a monster. The through line across all of it is that she never asks the audience to approve of her characters.