Rene Russo

Rene Russo's route into film was unusually long. An agent spotted her at a Rolling Stones concert in 1972; she signed with Ford, appeared on the covers of Vogue and Cosmopolitan through the rest of the decade, and did not act at all until the television series Sable in 1987. Her first film, Major League, opened in 1989, by which point she was thirty-five - roughly the age at which the industry traditionally stops finding work for women and starts offering them mothers.

The 1990s ignored that convention in her case. Lethal Weapon 3 in 1992 gave her Lorna Cole, an internal affairs sergeant written as Mel Gibson's equal in a fight rather than his reward for winning one. In the Line of Fire followed in 1993, opposite Clint Eastwood, then Outbreak in 1995. Barry Sonnenfeld's Get Shorty arrived the same year, took $115 million, and let her play comedy at the speed the script actually demanded of her.

The run held. Tin Cup and Ransom both opened in 1996, the second a large hit built on a parent's panic. Lethal Weapon 4 brought Lorna Cole back in 1998. Then The Thomas Crown Affair in 1999, in which she plays an insurance investigator plainly cleverer than everyone around her, and is written that way from beginning to end. It is the clearest statement of what she was for: adult, unimpressed, and never the object of the plot.

She then more or less stopped, taking roughly five years away from film after 2005 before returning in supporting parts, Thor in 2011 among them. The proper return came in 2014, in Nightcrawler, written and directed by her husband Dan Gilroy, whom she had married in 1992. As a television news director trading in other people's worst nights, she was nominated for a BAFTA in 2015 and won the Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress. She was sixty years old.