Actor: Eileen Atkins

Eileen Atkins co-created Upstairs, Downstairs, which is one of the most successful British television series ever made, and she and Jean Marsh devised it together.

Gosford Park gives her a cook, and Wit gives her a professor whose severity toward a dying former student is the film’s most complicated relationship. She has won an Olivier, a Tony and a BAFTA, and worked in Shakespeare for six decades.