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Best Villains Of All Time?

GNC

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Who do you think is the best villain of all time? No, I don't mean George W. Bush, ahahahahahahahaaaaa... oh dearie me, no, I mean fictional villains.

So is Darth Vader better than Michael Myers? Cruella De Vil better than Hannibal Lecter? What do you think?
 
Quite possibly:
Blofeldpleasance67.jpg
 
As literary villain, Miss Brunner, Jerry Cornelius's evil female antagonist, in 'The Final Programme' and the other Cornelius chronicles. She had a nasty habit of completely consuming her lovers and leaving nothing but the clothes they stood up in. :shock:

Gert Fröbe as Goldfinger, or Charles Gray, as Mocata, in 'The Devil Rides Out' for my film villain choices.

Some more possible film villains can be found here:
http://tv.cream.org/specialassignments/films/vote.htm
 
Well, while Ernst is right up there, and it's difficult to think of a better baddie, if we're talking real nasty pieces of work that make your flesh crawl and who really freak you out for years, and indeed have a lasting impression so you can't see the actor as anything else and anything that reminds you of them makes you break out in a cold sweat....

then I'd have to say Scorpio from Dirty Harry. Even hearing 'Row, row, row your boat' makes me think serial killing loons are on the rampage.

If, on the other hand, we're talking iconic bad guys, then it's got to be Hugo Drax. Or possibly Blofeld. Or Goldfinger. Or Zorin. Ooo...Scaramanga's quite nasty as well...

In fact, if it's true that a man should be judged by the quality of his enemies, then James Bond is impossible to beat.
 
As a western fan I'd add these nasty buggers to any list of villains:

Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef) - The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
Frank (Henry Fonda) - Once Upon a Time in The West
Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) - The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance
Miller (Jack Palance) - Shane
 
Hannibal Lector (and the the Brian Cox interpretation is better than Anthony Hopkins)

Gert Fröbe as Goldfinger is the best of the Bond Villains, with Donald Pleasance's Blofeld is close behind.

A recent entry is Mrs Coulter in "His Dark Materials"

And if we're talking aliens, it's always going to be the Daleks...
 
Micheal Corleone in the Godfather movies
The Terminator
Keyser Soze
The Joker
 
Alex DeLarge, who is more of an antihero than villain really...
And a more modern antihero: Tyler Durden.

The villain that scared me the most when I was little though, was Man. In Bambi, Watership Down, Lady and the Tramp, Animals of Farthing Wood, even Homeward bound to some extent, the bad guys were always Man.
 
Although hardly "Greatest Villian Of All Time", I'm quite partial to Albie Kinsella in Cracker.
 
My favorites would be O'Brien from 1984 (definitly one person you wouldn't want to be left alone with), Mr Burns and Father Dick Byrne (though he is only really Fr Ted's arch enemy.
 
I'd also cast a vote for Robert Mitchum's Harry Powell in Night of the Hunter.
 
General Woundwort. "Come back, you cowards! Dogs aren't dangerous!"

Iago. Macbeth.
 
I like the rather charming and lovable Cigarette Smoking Man from the X-files.
 
Great stuff everybody, but an awful lot of blokes on the list. No appreciation of The Wicked Witch of the West ("And your little dog, too!") or Servalan ("Maximum power!")?
 
Oh, well, if you want villainesses, Cruella deVille (from the book, not the movies) has everything you could want. Pyromania. Bizarre beauty. The desire to skin puppies. A tendency to drown cats. An unnatural attachment to fur.

For sheer versatility, I would like to propose Diana Wynne Jones's mother, whom she has credited as appearing in every one of her books as a villain. Once you know that, you start being able to pick her out, though she has greater or lesser degrees of evil, isn't always the primary antagonist, and takes different story roles, some of them benign in a weird way. Alas, too few people read Diana Wynne Jones.

For sheer perfection of banal evil, I give you the titular character of Jones's Aunt Maria (Black Maria in Britain), a sedentary and manipulative old woman who, confronted at the climax with a public revelation of all the harm she's done, including two deaths (one her own daughter), countless kidnappings, and decades-long incarcerations and transformations into animal shapes, responds by saying: "No, upon reflection, I have nothing in my life to reproach myself with, young man."
 
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also, or so i'm told, a sweet innocentconvent educated girl who had a breakdown after the servalan character went to her head :(

addm otingfor the clockwork nazi ninja from hellboy :D
 
is it my repressed memories playing up, or was it you that once said that you dressed up as servalan for a fancy dress party, complete with fake wall and chains? ("it's an old wall avon, and it waits")
 
Sadly, it's your memory playing tricks, because it sounds like something I would do, but I haven't. At least, not as far as I remember. But I confess, it sounded so much like something I would do, that I did have to think carefully before replying. ;)

I hadn't heard that about Jacqueline Pearce. What a shame. I did think it was one hell of a character.
 
But let's not forget the primary template for every Eastern criminal mastermind since (including Osama Bin Laden) - Dr Fu Manchu!

"A lean, aquiline face, with a brow like Shakespeare and the eyes of Satan..."

True, Sax Rohmer's books are hopelessly racist by todays standards (I even read one - whose title escapes me, alas - in which a fictionalised German Chancellor, based quite obviously on you-know-who, was written of in almost glowing terms) but it has to be said that the character cannot be categorised solely by the 'yellow peril' fears that were prevalent at the time. In fact, Fu Manchu is a hell of a lot more interesting than that (and certainly more so than his dullard adversary, Nayland-Smith); more ruthless than wicked, dubiously yet highly moral, a champion - by his own lights - of the oppressed, and so honorable that he frequently declines to kill Nayland-Smith, even though he could do so upon no more than a whim.

Quite deadly, but charismatic and charming with it. A true great villain.

And the stand-off he had with Professor Moriarty in the first volume of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was splendid to behold.
 
Darth Vader and Palpatine
Cigarette Smoking Man
John Simm's portrayal of The Master
Emperor Tiberius from Tacitus
Basil Wenceslas from Kevin J Anderson's Saga of the Seven Suns
Best Tolkien villain I think is the dragon Glaurung.
Bernardo Gui from Name of the Rose especially as portrayed by F. Murray Abraham (which brings to mind Salieri... might start a thread about best actors to portray villains)
 
Livia Drusilla.

The Queen (Snow White).

KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNN!!!!!!!!!! ;)
 
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