Jessica Lange

Jessica Lange's first film was the 1976 remake of King Kong, which is a difficult thing to survive. The reviews were unkind, some of them specifically to her, and the industry spent several years treating her as a decorative accident. It took five years for the correction to arrive, in the form of Bob Rafelson's The Postman Always Rings Twice in 1981, and then everything happened at once.

In 1982 she released Frances and Tootsie within months of each other - the first a grim account of the actress Frances Farmer, the second a comedy in which she plays a soap actress opposite a man in a dress. At the ceremony the following year she was nominated for Best Actress for one and won Best Supporting Actress for the other. Only Teresa Wright, in 1942, had managed both categories in a single year.

The nominations kept coming - Country in 1984, Sweet Dreams in 1985, Music Box in 1989 - and then came the strangest win of her career. Blue Sky was Tony Richardson's last film. Orion Pictures collapsed before it could be released and it sat on a shelf for three years, reaching cinemas in 1994. It won her Best Actress. Very few people take an Academy Award for a film the industry had quietly given up on.

The then-and-now angle for Lange is really a question of which medium. She largely stopped chasing film leads and went to television and the stage instead, taking Emmys for Grey Gardens and for two series of American Horror Story, and a Tony in 2016 for Long Day's Journey into Night. That completed the set - Oscar, Emmy, Tony. The woman the critics wrote off after King Kong finished holding every award the American profession gives out.