10 Most Iconic Villains In Movie History
The finest fiends in film.
Drama is all about conflict - you take a character, give them a goal, stick some obstacles in their way, and in the simplest of terms you’ve got yourself a screenplay. For every great movie hero, you need a great villain, and over 100 plus years of film, there have been some humdingers.
To that end, as often as not, the villain is the best part of the movie. It’s just so much more fun to be bad; for an actor to cut loose and embrace their dark side.
There are great villains, and then there are the truly iconic ones. These are the baddies who have evolved beyond their source movies, who exist beyond their role as something for a good guy to overcome.
Sometimes they’re reinvented and reimagined time and again, or become the heroes of their own story. Others they steal the show to such a degree that you can’t help but cheer for them.
Cinema’s most iconic villains become the first thing you think of when talking about the film itself. They may not emerge the winner, but they stick in the mind like nothing else.
10. Nurse Ratched - One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
From a certain perspective, Nurse Ratched is less a villain than a woman attempting to do a difficult job in exceptionally trying conditions. Salem State Hospital, a heavy duty mental facility, is not an easy place to run, and requires a certain steeliness in its head authority figure.
Over the course of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, however, the layers of Nurse Ratched are peeled back. Perhaps once she was a woman carrying out her role how she best saw fit, but she is now a dictator, wielding absolute power over a population of extremely vulnerable people and enjoying it.
Louise Fletcher’s Oscar winning performance is masterful - Ratched is robotic in her attempts to mask her humanity, but the darkness within slowly seeps out. She is petty officialdom run amok, a woman so beholden to her own made up laws that she can’t see the damage she is doing.
Netflix’s upcoming Ratched will reevaluate the character, with Sarah Paulson in the titular role. There’s a lot going on under the surface, and with luck this will be a worthy continuation of a great creation.