Emma Thompson

A letter landed on James Ivory's desk from an actress who wanted the role of Margaret Schlegel badly enough to audition by mail. Ivory gave Thompson the audition, and she won Best Actress for Howards End at the 1993 Oscars, beating Catherine Deneuve, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Susan Sarandon. Three years later, she adapted Sense and Sensibility herself and won again for the screenplay. She's the only person in Oscar history to hold wins in both acting and writing. The industry still hasn't fully processed that.

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande could have been a respectable late-career awards play. Instead she played a repressed widow who hires a young male sex worker, stood fully nude in front of a mirror on camera, and then told journalists to stop calling her brave for it. The film premiered at Sundance in 2022, holds 93% on Rotten Tomatoes, and earned her a Golden Globe nomination. She's doing the work actresses half her age won't touch, and she's annoyed when people make that the headline.

At Cambridge she was the first woman to join Footlights, the sketch club that also produced Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. Years later, she met future husband Greg Wise on the set of Sense and Sensibility, a script she had written. In 2003, she attended a Refugee Council event and met Tindyebwa Agaba, a Rwandan orphan and former child soldier. She and Wise adopted him. He went on to earn a master's in human-rights law and work as a detective with London's CID. She doesn't make much of it publicly, which is very much the point.