Anne Archer

Watch Beth Gallagher for a minute in Fatal Attraction (1987) and you notice what Anne Archer does that most actors cast as the wife do not. She is not waiting for the plot to reach her. Beth runs a flat, a daughter and a husband, and Archer plays her as a woman who would manage perfectly well if the husband vanished, which is the one thing Michael Douglas's Dan cannot bear to know. James Dearden's script gives her almost nothing to say, so she builds the character out of how she listens. We came away pitying Glenn Close, as the film means us to, and on Beth's side, which it does not quite mean and which Archer arranged on her own.

The part arrived after fifteen years of television guest spots and supporting film work, with one early lead in Lifeguard (1976). It made her, and for a while it looked as if it would keep making her: Cathy Ryan opposite Harrison Ford in Patriot Games (1992) and Clear and Present Danger (1994), Claire Kane in Robert Altman's Short Cuts (1993). Then the leads thinned out. Since the 2000s the work has been sporadic, a film such as Lullaby (2014), recurring television parts, stage work including The Graduate in 2001.

What she does well is poise under pressure at home: the woman at the centre of a household while men run about outside it. The Ryan films want exactly that, a doctor married to a man in a dangerous job who never seems to be merely his wife. Altman wanted something else, an actor who could be exact in small scenes where nobody is the lead, and she gave him that too. The limitation is that Hollywood found the shape and kept casting her into it, and the shape is a supporting one. She said as much to the Los Angeles Times in 1990: "I was good in a lot of films that nobody saw. You have to be in a film that gets a wide audience. That's what makes the difference." Body of Evidence (1993), a film almost nobody has a good word for, got seen and did her no favours.

Start with Fatal Attraction, which is a first-rate thriller for ninety minutes and something worse in the last reel, and watch Archer rather than Douglas whenever the phone rings. Then Short Cuts. She is one of those actors whose best work sits in films remembered for somebody else, and she appears to have made her peace with that some time ago.