Sofie Gråbøl

Denmark knew her for twenty years before Britain did. Gråbøl was seventeen when she took the lead in the film of Tove Ditlevsen's Barndommens gade, and she was in Pelle the Conqueror the following year in a small role. Danish television made her a household name at home with Taxa and Nikolaj og Julie long before anyone abroad could place the face.

Then Sarah Lund. The Killing gave her a detective who withholds almost everything: no speeches, no breakdown scene, no attempt to be liked, just a woman who keeps working long past the point at which everyone around her has agreed to stop. Gråbøl plays her with a stillness that forces the camera to come to her rather than the reverse, and it made a Danish procedural into an export phenomenon, particularly in Britain, where it arrived subtitled and found a large audience anyway.

Her range is wider than the export version suggests. She is very funny in Flickering Lights, one of the Danish crime comedies built on spectacular criminal incompetence, and she is Kalinka in Nightwatch, a morgue-set thriller with a genuinely nasty streak. Since The Killing she has done precise English-language supporting work as Governor Odegard in Fortitude, Catherine Stamper in The Undoing and a small part in The House That Jack Built, while continuing at home in The Chestnut Man, Prisoner, The Day Will Come and The Last Viking. In Daisy Diamond she plays a character named Sofie Gråbøl, which is either a joke or a dare.