Kathleen Turner

Kathleen Turner came out of the theatre - a Broadway debut in Gemini in 1977 - and arrived in film fully formed. Body Heat in 1981 was her first picture, and she played Matty Walker with a control that first-time screen actors are not supposed to have. The film is a deliberate reconstruction of forties noir, which meant the part required an archetype rather than a person, and she supplied one without ever appearing to work at it.

What she did next was the surprising bit. Rather than repeat the femme fatale she went to comedy, and turned out to be better at it. Romancing the Stone in 1984 and Prizzi's Honor in 1985 won her the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a musical or comedy two years running. Peggy Sue Got Married in 1986 brought her only Academy Award nomination. Then The War of the Roses in 1989, which is a comedy in the way a car crash is an event.

The voice deserves its own paragraph, because it did a job of work independently of her. In 1988 she supplied the speaking voice of Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit and went uncredited; the singing was Amy Irving's. It became the most widely heard thing she ever did, and most of the people who heard it had no idea whose it was. She returned to the stage in 1990 for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and was nominated for a Tony.

Then the early nineties, and rheumatoid arthritis, which changed the terms entirely. She could not work at the same rate, and for a while the press decided the difference in her appearance meant something else. The then-and-now comparison in her case is an unusually blunt lesson in what those photographs leave out. She kept working, a good deal of it in the theatre, where the audience is in the room and the camera is not.