Jean Smart

Charlene Frazier was the sweet one on Designing Women, a show full of opinionated Southern women, which should have been career death. Instead she held her own against Dixie Carter's grandstanding for five seasons, playing the only character on that show who wasn't constantly scoring points. Two back-to-back Emmy wins for a guest turn on Frasier in 2000 and 2001 made clear she wasn't just the nice girl from Atlanta.

Watchmen in 2019 reset the conversation. She played Laurie Juspeczyk like someone who'd been betrayed by superheroes and was done pretending otherwise, and earned an Emmy nomination for it. Then Hacks gave her the role she'd been building toward for 40 years: a Las Vegas stand-up whose legendary act is starting to chip at the edges. She's won four Emmys for it. She's not a comeback story. She's just better than she used to be.

She's had Type 1 diabetes since she was 13 and has testified before the U.S. Senate about research funding. On Who Do You Think You Are?, she discovered she's a maternal descendant of Dorcas Hoar, one of the last women convicted in the Salem witch trials. Her husband of 33 years, Richard Gilliland, died suddenly in March 2021 while she was filming Hacks. They'd met on the Designing Women set, 35 years earlier.