Miss Anne Marie Wilkes Dugan, RN lives beyond the first degree of unhinged.

Annie is an obsessed fan of Paul Sheldon, author of a series of period romance novels starring Misery Chastain, whom Wilkes dangerously empathizes with. These are just novels within a novel however. Wilkes' disturbed mind is the propeller of the conflict in Stephen King's Misery, a claustrophobic novel about a novelist held captive by an obsessive fan.

Wilkes is sane enough to act cherubic and retain a job but insane enough to push her father off the stairs and kill babies. The only giveaways are her unhealthy obsession with the Misery Chastain novels and her tendency to swear like a child ("He didn't get out of the cockadoodie car!").

Wilkes is as terrifying onscreen as on the pages of King's book. For her teeth-rattling portrayal of the postal Wilkes, Kathy Bates won the Best Actress Oscar in 1990 and posted the character on the American Film Institute's top 20 villains of all time.