Meg Ryan

Meg Ryan spent the first half of the eighties in daytime television and supporting parts - two years on As the World Turns, then a small role as Goose's wife in Top Gun in 1986 and a broader one in Innerspace the year after. None of it suggested what was coming. When Harry Met Sally arrived in 1989, written by Nora Ephron and directed by Rob Reiner, and one lunchtime scene in Katz's delicatessen became the most quoted comic moment of the decade.

It brought her first Golden Globe nomination and a category all to herself. Joe Versus the Volcano in 1990 paired her with Tom Hanks for the first time, and Sleepless in Seattle in 1993 repeated the pairing to enormous effect, earning a second nomination. The film works largely because the two leads barely share a scene until the end, which requires both of them to be interesting alone. She was, by that point, the only actress in Hollywood the studios trusted to carry a romantic comedy without help.

She spent the middle of the decade pushing against it. When a Man Loves a Woman in 1994 is a film about alcoholism with no jokes in it. Courage Under Fire in 1996 put her in a military inquiry drama opposite Denzel Washington. Neither changed how she was cast. In 1998 she made City of Angels and You've Got Mail in the same year, the latter reuniting her with Hanks and Ephron for a third time and bringing a third Golden Globe nomination.

The then-and-now comparison for Ryan is the one people get most wrong. The usual story is decline, but the record is simply a woman who stopped taking the parts on offer when the parts stopped being interesting. She never received an Academy Award nomination, which says more about how the Academy treats comedy than about the performances. She directed her first film, Ithaca, in 2015. The nineties photographs show someone the industry had decided was everybody's. The later ones show someone who took that back.