Actor: Ian McShane

Ian McShane worked in British film and television for forty years, including the long-running Lovejoy, before Deadwood made him internationally famous at sixty.

Al Swearengen is the performance: an obscene, articulate, genuinely frightening saloon owner whose monologues are written in something close to iambic verse and delivered as though they were ordinary speech.

Sexy Beast gave him a similar register in ninety minutes, playing a crime boss whose menace is entirely in what he does not say.

The John Wick films made him a fixture for a new audience, and he has worked constantly into his eighties.