Actor: Tim Robbins

Tim Robbins won Best Supporting Actor for Mystic River, playing a man damaged in childhood whose adult behaviour the film keeps deliberately ambiguous.

The Shawshank Redemption is the performance most people know, and its restraint is what allows Morgan Freeman’s narration to work.

Bull Durham and The Player show the comic register, and he directed Dead Man Walking and Bob Roberts, both explicitly political.

He founded and runs The Actors’ Gang theatre company, which works extensively in California prisons.