Long before Cynthia Nixon wore a pantsuit on Sex and the City and shyly asserted her authority as a downtrodden sister on The Gilded Age , she was a nervous German maid willing to do anything for a bite of good pastry. You may not immediately remember her presence, but when Nixon was 16, she had a crucial role in the 1984 film Amadeus playing Lorl, a young woman whom F. Murray Abraham’s Salieri hires to spy upon his bitter rival, Mozart. In exchange for food and money, Lorl passes along information about Mozart and is frightened by his descent into mania, but in a touching moment at the end of the film, she still shows up at his funeral.

The role wasn’t Nixon’s first film performance. As a teen actor, she had appeared in the summer-camp movie Little Darlings, and she worked on

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