Daryl Hannah

Daryl Hannah appeared in Brian De Palma's The Fury in 1978 while still a teenager, then spent four years in small parts before Ridley Scott gave her Pris in Blade Runner in 1982 - a replicant built for pleasure who turns out to be the most physically dangerous thing in the film. The performance is largely non-verbal and entirely committed. It also set the pattern for the decade that followed, in which directors kept hiring her to play something not quite human.

Splash confirmed it. Ron Howard's film opened in March 1984, took close to $70 million in North America, and won Hannah the Saturn Award for Best Actress at the following year's ceremony. She worked constantly through the rest of 1984, in The Pope of Greenwich Village and Reckless, and the mermaid became a problem she never entirely solved. For most of the decade the question asked of her was whether she could be strange and ordinary in the same picture.

She could, mostly. Roxanne and Wall Street both opened in 1987, the first a romantic comedy built around her, the second a supporting role in a film that belonged to two men. Steel Magnolias in 1989 placed her inside an ensemble that did not need her to be decorative, and she was better in it than the marketing suggested. Grumpy Old Men in 1993 was a commercial hit. The leading parts thinned out afterwards, and the 1990s ended quietly.

Quentin Tarantino restarted her in 2003 and 2004, casting her as the one-eyed Elle Driver across both volumes of Kill Bill, which is the rare comeback that improves on the original typecasting. Most of her time since has gone to environmental protest - arrested at a mountaintop removal demonstration in West Virginia in 2009, at a White House sit-in against the Keystone pipeline in 2011, and on a Texas farm in October 2012. She married Neil Young in 2018 and now directs more often than she acts.