Cautionary Women

Soaps burst at the seams with villainesses, but Sheila Carter takes the cake among them. Simply put, this woman has seen it all, said it all, and done it all as an all-around, Grade-A soap beeyatch. Played (for the most part) by the magnificent Kimberlin Brown, Sheila Carter is one of the few faces on TV you’d give anything to impale with a fireplace poker . Her evil is such that no single soap opera could contain it. She is one of the first characters to cross over two soaps, starting out as a harmless-looking nurse in The Young and the Restless before slithering as a full-on hellion into Bold and the Beautiful . By the time she left Genoa City for Los Angeles, Sheila Carter had daytime TV-watching America clenching their fists. Every city baits a new man for Sheila Carter. First it was Dr. Scott Grainger in Y&R , then fashion house owner Eric Forrester in B&B . When Sheila Carter wants a man, you’d know better than stand in the way.  A partial list of Sheila Carter’s ...

Maleficent ranks beyond the first degree of animated villainy.  For those who may not know, Maleficent is the fearsome antagonist in Sleeping Beauty , the 1959 animated adaptation of Charles Perrault’s fairy tale. It was Walt Disney’s last fairy tale adaptation before his death. Surely he died in peace, for Sleeping Beauty turned out very succulently on the big screen. Had it not been for Maleficent, Sleeping Beauty would just have been a generic copy of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves . Maleficent was a casting coup on many fronts. Animator Marc Davis made the best call, developing Maleficent as a visually arresting villainess rather than the hunched hag of tradition. See Maleficent in her formative stages of development: Maleficent was voiced by Eleanor Audley, the same talent behind Lady Tremaine of Cinderella . Half the fun of watching Maleficent lies in the speeches she gives. With Audley’s icy pipes, Maleficent sounds ready to breathe ice ...

To whom else does a blog about villainesses pay tribute first than Evil Personified Himself? Or is it Herself? This is the theological question you must field from watching Bedazzled , the 2000 update of the 1967 film of the same name. In this version, Elizabeth Hurley plays the Princess of Darkness out for the soul of Brendan Fraser’s love-struck geek. Screenwriters Larry Gelbart, Harold Ramis, and Peter Tolan threw a thousand clichés into a lake of fire by casting Hurley for the role, which had last gone to her countryman Peter Cook. Onscreen, Apollyon ditches the ties and briefs for PVC suits and two-piece bikinis. It’s eye candy of Faustian proportions. Bedazzled 2000 broke ground insofar as it paved the way for similar characters in The Passion and The Night Chronicles: Devil . At the turn of the millennium, the man-sells-his-soul premise in movies hung by the thread of Hurley’s riotous portrayal of Satan. This movie also made another point. That aside from being gende...