Margaret Tyzack

A classically trained British thespian through and through, Margaret Tyzack is so convincing in her ability to strike a regal pose that she's accumulated more roles as queens and powerful matriarchs than most other stage actresses. Although she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1962, she began gracing sophisticated various TV mini-series as early as the '50s. The actress has been a particularly prolific force in British television's many playhouse programs and classically inclined anthology series. In fact, she famously played the vengeful Bette in a "Masterpiece Theater" adaptation of the realist tale of family betrayal "Cousin Bette," garnering her an Emmy nomination that, while impressive, fails to even begin to stack up against her numerous theater awards.

After portraying the influential mother of an emperor in "I, Claudius," a landmark epic mini-series that remains one of the BBC's most successful productions of all time, she made a rare appearance in an American TV series with the educational, if not so action packed, "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles." Her role as Jones' prim-and-proper tutor on that show, along with minor turns in director Stanley Kubrick's sardonic "A Clockwork Orange" and his profoundly cosmic "2001: A Space Odyssey," is among her most familiar to general stateside audiences. Tyzack has continued well into the sixth decade of her career with guest appearances on such British series as the picturesque procedural "Midsomer Murders."