Olivia Cooke

Olivia Cooke, from Oldham, started where a lot of young British actors start, in horror, and did it more or less all at once: Bates Motel from 2013, then Ouija, The Quiet Ones and The Signal inside about a year of each other. Emma Decody in Bates Motel is the one that mattered, a chronically ill teenager written with more patience than the genre usually allows, and it ran for five years alongside the film work.

What she is unusually good at is playing people whose feelings are not visible from outside. Amanda in Thoroughbreds is the clearest case: a girl who has no emotional responses at all and has taught herself which faces to make, which requires an actor to perform flatness and keep it readable at the same time. Sound of Metal uses a version of the same reserve for something warmer, and Rachel in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl works because she refuses the sentiment the premise is pushing at her.

The big commercial jobs came after. Art3mis in Ready Player One made her recognisable, and Alicent Hightower in House of the Dragon made her a lead: a woman who begins as somebody's friend and daughter and is slowly compressed into an institution, played over years of narrative time without the performance ever announcing the change. Around it she has kept the odder work going, Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair, Sid Baker in Slow Horses, Cherry Laine in The Girlfriend. It is a well-managed career, and the small films are still where the best acting is.