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There are a few reasons a movie character may find herself in hospital. Maybe she's very virtuous and kind and widely beloved, and she's going to hospital to suffer becomingly from a wasting disease in order to dramatize what it means to be a hero. Debra Winger pretty much retired her jersey after playing this role in Terms of Endearment. Maybe she's a child whose potential will never be fulfilled, as in Alex: The Life of a Child.

Most often, though, movie characters find themselves in hospital when their overweening pride -- their hubris, if you will -- is so great that only a health scare will take them down a peg or two. If there were any film justice, these characters should always find themselves on Margo Martindale's ward.

Margo Martindale makes a great nurse, because she absolutely will not take any crap, from anyone. Her East Texas accent makes her sound as if her patients' ailments are supremely boring; no matter what manner of histrionics they might attempt, Martindale's unimpressed. Her heavyset figure makes her seem sturdy and maternal and all those other stereotypes one associates with larger, older women, and thus makes her look like someone who'd feel at home matter-of-factly clearing away dinner trays or administering medication via injection -- along with a jaded quip -- in a patient's ass.

Martindale must enjoy playing nurses, because she keeps taking such roles -- in Sabrina, In Dreams, and the recent 28 Days (of which more will be said, below), and possibly also in the medically themed ...First, Do No Harm and Critical Care (though we can't confirm her role, not having seen either of the last two titles). In keeping with the sardonic/nurturing mojo she has working, Martindale plays a psychiatrist in Marvin's Room, and a nun in Dead Man Walking; and in Lorenzo's Oil, she is mother and caretaker to an ailing child. (She also rules in Twilight, in a complete deviation from type, playing an extortionist in league with Liev Schreiber. I talked a lot of shit about Twilight when I first started seeing trailers for it, because it seemed like a geriatric version of every other "suspense" "thriller" on the market, but it's actually a really engrossing, really underrated movie.)

The apex of Martindale's achievement as a sardonic nurse came this year in the aforementioned 28 Days. Checking Sandra Bullock into her rehab centre, Martindale manages in less than five minutes (and probably even fewer lines) to cut Sandra Bullock down to size, informing her that she'll be carrying her own luggage, and ferreting out Vicodin concealed in Bullock's bag. Margo Martindale spends most of 28 Days planted behind the rehab centre's reception desk, and she still displays more personality and charisma than Mike O'Malley and Azura Skye combined.

Margo Martindale slashed through the hubris of a woman who would go on to embody Miss Congeniality, and she did so with equal parts nursing and sardonicism. It's her way.