3. Meredith Vickers (Prometheus)
While Noomi Rapace's Dr Elizabeth Shaw is the lead in Ridley Scott's sideways-prequel to the Alien species, it's Charlize Theron's icy corporate leader Meredith Vickers that steals the show and the film from everyone else. Vickers is a brilliant piece of writing - every action is an agenda and from the very beginning, she evokes the cool blondes that Alfred Hitchcok was obsessed by. Slowly throughout the film she thaws, even deigning to smile or show emotion in the frozen tundra of her conglomerate boss facade as the experiment that took the intrepid space crew of the
S.S. Prometheus to the mysterious LV-426 collapses around them. Vickers is a superbly cast and portrayed villain by Theron who ends up being a vaguely identifiable character when the last twenty minutes roll around - a woman all but abandoned by her immortality-seeking, near-neglectful father in favour of his robotic progeny David. It's a shame then that Vickers is killed in such a ridiculous and now oft-parodied way - by failing to move sideways to avoid the massive, crashing wreckage of the Engineer spaceship. Even if the rumours of Vickers being an android are true, there's little chance that she survived the crushing impact, which is a shame as the dynamic between Elizabeth and David could have been a hell of a lot more interesting if Vickers had simply learned the sideways shuffle.