Amy Madigan

She spent over a decade gigging as a rock vocalist and pianist before switching tracks at 29. After training at the Lee Strasberg Institute, her debut in Love Child (1982) earned a Golden Globe nomination for New Star of the Year. Twice in a Lifetime (1985) followed with an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. The long pivot from music stage to film set wasn't wasted. She plays characters with a lived-in groundedness that comes from actually having done something else first.

Forty years after her first Oscar nomination, she won Best Supporting Actress for Weapons (2025), reportedly setting the record for the longest such gap for an actress. The horror film turned Gladys into a TikTok meme and a Halloween costume, which is not how most 75-year-olds enter the cultural conversation. She's now attached to Apple's psychological thriller Sponsor alongside Jason Segel. The career math is simple: 40 years of selective choices, one breakout horror role, and suddenly she's everywhere.

She was among those who sat stone-faced when the honorary Oscar went to Elia Kazan in 1999, a director who'd named names before HUAC. She's since called the moment 'shameful.' Her marriage to Ed Harris has run 42 years and produced 11 shared film credits, including Pollock, where she played Peggy Guggenheim to his Jackson Pollock. Her father was a Newsweek journalist who interviewed everyone from Nixon to MLK on national television. Strong opinions, apparently, run in the family.