Geena Davis

Geena Davis arrived through the modelling agencies and a small part in Tootsie in 1982, the sort of beginning that usually leads nowhere in particular. What distinguished her was scale and timing - six feet tall, unusually good at deadpan, and willing to work inside genre pictures that better-behaved actresses avoided. David Cronenberg's The Fly in 1986 and Tim Burton's Beetlejuice in 1988 handed her two of the decade's stranger leading roles, and neither of them required her to stand about being decorative.

The prestige arrived almost immediately afterwards. She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for The Accidental Tourist in 1988, playing a dog trainer whose relentlessness wears down William Hurt's grief. Three years later Ridley Scott cast her opposite Susan Sarandon in Thelma & Louise, and both women were nominated for Best Actress at the 1992 ceremony. Neither won. The film took six nominations and converted one, for Callie Khouri's screenplay, and entered the National Film Registry in 2016.

A League of Their Own followed in 1992, took $132 million worldwide and put her at the centre of a genuine hit. Then the arithmetic turned. Cutthroat Island in 1995 and The Long Kiss Goodnight in 1996, both directed by her then husband Renny Harlin, were expensive and unprofitable, and the industry drew the conclusion it usually draws about the woman rather than the budget. Leading roles stopped arriving with any regularity after that.

What she did with the interval is the interesting part. She took up archery seriously enough to reach the semi-finals of the 1999 United States Olympic trials, founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media in 2004 to count how often women actually appear on screen, and played the first female American president in Commander in Chief, winning a Golden Globe in 2006. The Academy gave her the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 2019. It is an odd second act, and a better one than most.