Shirley Henderson

Shirley Henderson has one of the most recognisable voices in British film, high and light and slightly out of time, and a career built on refusing to let it typecast her. She came up through Scottish theatre and television, and her accolades include two Scottish BAFTAs and an Olivier Award.

The voice is both the trick and the trap. It got her cast as Moaning Myrtle in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets when she was in her thirties, playing a schoolgirl ghost opposite actual twelve year olds, and it got her the tiny alien Babu Frik decades later. But listen to what she does with it in Trainspotting, where Gail is the only sober adult in a film full of people performing their own chaos, or in Filth, where the same register carries something genuinely unsettling. She can sound like a child and act like someone who has seen everything.

Her filmography is unusually wide for a supporting player: costume drama, Scottish social realism, Italian fairy tale grotesque in Tale of Tales, Korean satire in Okja, and a quarter of a century of turning up as Jude in the Bridget Jones films. She works constantly and rarely leads, a choice British character actors of her generation often made, and it has kept her employed across genres that share nothing at all except her.