Sandra Oh

Sandra Oh was a known quantity in Canada long before America worked her out. She won Genie Awards for Double Happiness and The Diary of Evelyn Lau in 1994, spent the years from 1996 to 2002 as Rita Wu on Arliss, and then took the supporting role in Sideways that everybody remembers, playing a woman whose response to being lied to is the most cathartic scene in the film.

Oh's gift is speed. She plays people whose minds run faster than their mouths and who resent having to slow down for anyone. Cristina Yang in Grey's Anatomy is a surgeon with no interest in being liked, and she held ten seasons of an enormous show together by refusing the warmth the format kept offering her. Killing Eve handed her the opposite problem, an MI5 desk officer who is bored, and found its comedy in a competent woman being thrilled by her own bad decisions.

The recognition came late and then all at once: two Golden Globes, four Screen Actors Guild Awards, one Primetime Emmy from fourteen nominations, and a place on the Time 100 in 2019. She has also become one of the busiest voices in animation, usually cast as a mother with an iron will, in Turning Red, Over the Moon, Raya and the Last Dragon and Invincible. The most pointed recent work is The Chair, where she plays a department head trying to keep a dying humanities faculty alive, and which she also produced.