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Jessica Lange is Hollywood royalty and one of the greatest working actresses in the last thirty years. A six-time Oscar nominee (she’s won twice, for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress), Lange has starred in a wide range of movies, from biopics (like Frances and Sweet Dreams), high-profile remakes (The Postman Always Rings Twice and Cape Fear), and emotional comic dramas (Crimes of the Heart, Cousin Bette — hell, even Tootsie would fit in that category). But anyone who saw her first movie (the much-maligned 1976 remake of King Kong) may not have expected much from the actor, and the kids these days probably don’t know about her steady and acclaimed career in the ’80s, either. But thanks to American Horror Story — and her full-on embrace of camp — Jessica Lange managed to revitalize her career in sixth decade.

It’s no secret that it’s difficult to be an actress “of a certain age,” and Lange herself experienced that as she aged. She received her second Oscar for her role as a manic-depressive housewife in 1994’s Blue Sky (a film that was completed in 1991 when she 42). While she managed to get some starring roles in the years that followed Blue Sky‘s release and her Oscar win, they paled in comparison to her string of acclaimed roles in the ’80s. There was the titular character’s wife in the epic Rob Roy, the daughter of a dying Iowan farmer who feuds with her sisters in A Thousand Acres, a scheming French peasant in Cousin Bette, and an overbearing and murderous mother-in-law in Hush. While none were particuarlly successful at the box office or with critics, Lange proved to hold her own in each. In Titus, a polarizing adaptation of Shakespeare’s bloodiest tragedy, Lange shone alongside Anthony Hopkins and Alan Cumming in a particularly experimental and underrated film directed by Julie Taymor.

While she continued to act in film in the early aughts (her biggest film was Tim Burton’s Big Fish, in which she had a supporting role), Lange turned to the stage. She had already played Maggie in a TV version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway (opposite Alec Baldwin). She made her West End debut in Eugene O’Neil’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night in 2000, and returned to Broadway in 1995 in another Tennessee Williams play, The Glass Menagerie. It makes sense to view Lange as a quintessential Teneessee Williams character: she balances faux Southern charm (despite being a Minnesota native) with a voracious beauty; she can be as brutal as she is delicate.

Williams’ melodramatic stylings are a perfect fit for Lange, who seems to relish the chance to show off her skills rather than offer a subtle performance. That’s not shade — Lange’s full-throttle style is part of her appeal, which is why she has successfully pivoted in her career in the last decade with her work on television. First, there was the HBO-produced Grey Gardens, a sort-of remake of the classic Maysles Brothers documentary that became a cult classic. Starring alongside Drew Barrymore, Lange won an Emmy for her performance as “Big Edie” Bouvier — the aristocratic aunt of Jacqueline Kennedy who, along with her daughter “Little Edie,” wasted away in her dilapidated East Hampton estate. While Little Edie was somewhat of a gay icon, the HBO film depicted the Beales in their glamorous heyday, allowing audiences to see a visual representation of Edith Beale before she let herself go.

You can see a little bit of that character (and a lot of Tennessee Williams’ Maggie, Blanche, and Amanda) in the role of Constance Langdon, the bitter and aging next-door neighbor in the first iteration of American Horror Story. The role, which won Lange another Emmy, was the actor’s first of four starring roles on Ryan Murphy’s psycho-sexual horror anthology series; she’d later play a terrifying nun, an age-obsessed witch, and a wooden-legged freak show proprietor with a penchant for crooning David Bowie songs. (She won her third Emmy for the show’s third season.)

Lange’s move to TV was a smart one, as the medium is proving to be fertile ground for women over 40 (Meryl Streep, it seems, is getting all of the plum roles in film and shutting out her contemporaries). And with television becoming more artful, working as a medium that tells narrative stories with the same prestige as film, Lange managed to find a larger, and broader, audience in the last four seasons of American Horror Story than she did in the previous fifteen years on film. She seems to be standing her ground and sticking to her promise that the fourth season of American Horror Story would be her last, so we can only hope that she finds another role — either on television or on the big screen — that allows her to show off her skills and, most importantly, have as much fun as she’s been having in the last four years.

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Photos: Orion Pictures / HBO / FX