Sam Waterston

Sam Waterston came out of the theatre and never entirely left it. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1940, he has an Academy Award nomination, a Tony nomination and two BAFTA nominations on his record, alongside wins including a Primetime Emmy, a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild award. He took a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2010 and was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2012.

What he does better than almost anyone is decency under pressure. Hand Waterston a man who believes in an institution and watch him discover the institution will not hold. He was Nick Carraway in the 1974 Great Gatsby, the observer who cannot stop watching. He was Sydney Schanberg in The Killing Fields, a reporter whose professional courage and personal cowardice turn out to be the same act. Woody Allen used him four times, counting an uncredited turn in Hannah and Her Sisters, and in Interiors, September and Crimes and Misdemeanors he is always the sane man in a room of people coming apart.

Then Law & Order made him permanent. Jack McCoy is the role that ate the rest: a prosecutor who argues the law like a personal grievance, played with a specific hoarse fury no other cast member could match, and he brought the character over to Law & Order: Trial by Jury as well. The later work went gentler, Charlie Skinner on The Newsroom and Sol Bergstein on Grace and Frankie, while the presidents and statesmen kept arriving, from Franklin Delano Roosevelt in The Six Triple Eight to the voice of Abraham Lincoln in The Civil War.