All rise for the Golden Globes! They're often treated as the opening act to the Oscars—less a crystal ball than an appetizer, but a glamorous one nonetheless. Over the decades, the Golden Globes have honored some of cinema's most memorable heroines, antiheroes, and outright villains. From manipulative schemers to serial killers, these characters prove that audiences can't look away from a compelling bad woman. And the Golden Globe for Most Villainous Female Characters goes to... Rosalyn Rosenfeld The only thing softening Jennifer Lawrence's unabashed chaos in American Hustle is her impeccable comedic timing. As the unpredictable Rosalyn Rosenfeld, Lawrence turns every scene into a disaster waiting to happen. The performance earned her the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress at the 2014 ceremony. Sally Bowles Liza Minnelli's Golden Globe and Oscar-winning lead role in Cabaret stops short of being an outright villain, but she is complicit in Nazism through her ...
A 3rd-century CE statue of Hecate, the Greek goddess of witchcraft, in the Vatican Museums. Credit: Mark Cartwright "Overpowered" is a word that gets thrown around a lot in geek culture, mainly for characters who are practically invincible. But what do you expect when a character is supposed to be a deity? This god-tier chaos happens an awful lot in fiction. From comics to movies, deities arrive fully loaded, lusting for universal domination and doing damage to superheroes with ease. Many fictional deities defy gender altogether. But when they are portrayed as goddesses, they're often in a league of their own. At times self-righteous, sometimes downright malevolent, female deities wield a kind of power that could be all too rare in the real world. For this list of goddesses, we're skipping mythological figures like Athena, Eris, or Kali as well as overt depictions of them; they belong to a realm between folklore and religion. Instead, let's bow down at the alta...