Goldie Hawn

Goldie Hawn was hired for Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In in 1968 and given a part built around dissolving into giggles, which she performed so convincingly that it took years to shake. Her third film was Cactus Flower in 1969, and it won her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She did not attend the ceremony; Raquel Welch collected it on her behalf. Very few people begin a film career with a statuette and an unhelpful reputation at the same time.

The seventies were spent proving the reputation wrong, mostly by choosing well. Butterflies Are Free in 1972, then The Sugarland Express in 1974, Shampoo in 1975 and Foul Play in 1978. Golden Globe nominations followed most of them. She was one of the very few women in that decade who could open a film without a male star attached to the poster, and the industry tended to treat this as a curiosity rather than as information.

Private Benjamin in 1980 is where she stopped waiting to be offered things. She produced it as well as starring in it, having pushed the project through a studio system that did not believe a comedy led by a woman would sell tickets. It became one of the largest hits of the year and brought her a second Academy Award nomination, this time for Best Actress. The point was made twice over, commercially and on the ballot.

The then-and-now comparison usually stops at the hair and the smile, which is where it has always stopped, and that is rather the difficulty. Hawn spent thirty years being described in terms that had little to do with what she was actually doing - the producing credit, the box-office record, the audience she built and kept without ever being handed one. The photographs show a face. The filmography shows somebody running a business.