Suzanne Pleshette

The voice did half the work. Born in Brooklyn in 1937, Pleshette began in theatre and moved into film in the early 1960s with a low, smoke-cured delivery that made her sound like she had already heard whatever you were about to say, and Hollywood spent a decade deciding whether that made her a leading lady or the wisecracking friend.

Her first significant film role here is Annie Hayworth in The Birds in 1963, the schoolteacher who loves a man she cannot have and says so plainly. It is the most adult writing in the picture and the reason her performance survives it. Rome Adventure, from the year before, is not among the credits listed here. Then came a long Disney stretch, The Ugly Dachshund, Blackbeard's Ghost, The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin, The Shaggy D.A., where she played the sensible woman standing next to whatever nonsense the studio had cooked up. She was never bad in them and they never stretched her.

Television finally gave her a part worth having: Emily Hartley on The Bob Newhart Show from 1972 to 1978, a wife written as an equal rather than as an audience for her husband's jokes. She was nominated for three Emmy Awards and two Golden Globes across her career, two of those Emmy nominations for this role.

The late work is nicely perverse. She voiced Zira in The Lion King II: Simba's Pride, a villain built almost entirely out of that voice, and played Claire Arnold in Good Morning, Miami. She died in 2008.