The Shohreh Aghdashloo You Need to Know

Some actors have a signature role; Shohreh Aghdashloo has a signature register — a voice like smoke over gravel that directors have been trying to bottle since she arrived in Los Angeles. This month, with her memoir The Alley of Love and Yellow Jasmines out in paperback, is as good a time as any to catch up on a career that refuses to fit a category.

Born in Tehran, Aghdashloo was already a star of Iranian cinema when the 1979 revolution made her choice for her: she drove out of the country with a suitcase and restarted from zero in London, then Los Angeles. Two decades of theater and television later, Vadim Perelman's House of Sand and Fog (2003) — adapted from Andre Dubus III's novel — earned her an Academy Award nomination, the first ever for an Iranian actress.

Since then she has collected an Emmy for House of Saddam, stolen scenes in 24 and Grimm, and voiced everything from video games to documentaries. Directors cast her, one producer joked, 'when the part needs someone who has seen empires fall.'

Update: a year after this profile first ran, she was cast as UN power broker Chrisjen Avasarala in The Expanse, the adaptation of James S. A. Corey's novels — and turned a supporting politician into the show's undisputed center of gravity. We regret nothing about the headline.