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The mark of a fine HITG! is the ability to make a lasting and distinct impression without an extraordinarily high number of credits. Celia Weston is, in our opinion, just such a HITG!.

Celia Weston is tall, blonde, and Southern. While not a classic beauty in the Catherine Deneuve mode, she does possess the handsome, stately elegance that a lot of Southern women have; she has the look of someone who, in another time, would be said to "really take care of herself." As such, Weston tends to play two particular types of characters for whom appearing to be "done up" at all times is de rigueur.

First, there are the Blowsy Southern Dames. In this class, I would place her roles in Alice (filling the "sassy Southern waitress" quota after the departure of Polly "Kiss My Grits" Holliday); Dead Man Walking (as the mother of one of Sean Penn's murder victims), Flirting With Disaster (as Ben Stiller's biological mother...or is she?), and K-PAX. The last of these, in fact, is practically a parody of all blowsy southern dames; Weston plays a Miss Havisham-esque mental patient who, in her dementia, still makes up her face and puts on her costume jewellery and sets her table as if eternally expecting a gentleman caller. She's so blowsy, she's blown her sanity clear on out the door, Big Daddy.

Then, there are the Snooty Upper-Class Ladies, as in The Talented Mr. Ripley (in which Weston plays Cate Blanchett's rich aunt); Joe Gould's Secret (as a coolly professional receptionist at the '50s-era New Yorker); and the current In the Bedroom (as an insensitive family friend to Sissy Spacek and Tom Wilkinson). It's just as much fun to watch her swanning about Flirting With Disaster, dripping with gold jewellery, calling her grandson a "cracker," and never too far from her tumbler of bourbon, all, "Not the Chinese zodiac!" as it is to see her purse up those stately lips and broadcast her bitter New England disapproval at the homeless Ian Holm in Joe Gould's Secret.

We never would have thought that the blowsy dame and the frigid matron were two sides of the same dramatic coin. Celia Weston has corrected that impression for us, and it's a mistake we'll never make again.