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Best Villains Of All Time?

Having been bought up in the country and seen cats, rats, etc rip each other to pieces I was always surprised to see how graphic the violence in that fight was.

Man...

Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law-
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed-
 
As for my own vote for most recent best villains - has to be both Ciro Di Marzio and Gennaro Savastano from the TV series Gomorrah: utterly, utterly horrible - and horribly, horribly compelling.
 
Isn't that scene also often cited as a textbook example of either improvised or impromptu acting that has subsequently become a classic cinema moment. Or is that a myth?

You're right - I was recently reading an interview with David Patrick Kelly and he said he was invited to improvise a bit of business in that scene. Now it's the most famous bit of the movie.
 
You're right - I was recently reading an interview with David Patrick Kelly and he said he was invited to improvise a bit of business in that scene. Now it's the most famous bit of the movie.
I remember he said he based it on someone he knew in his younger days.
 
Both versions of Magneto in the X-men films. Though it's arguable that the young Magneto (Michael Fassbinder) is an anti-hero, and even the older Magneto (Ian McKellan) is motivated by protecting the other mutants, rather than conquering the world or for wealth.

And a mention for Patrica Highsmith's Tom Ripley.

Edmund white on Tom Ripley and Patricia Highsmith.

This essay is part of T’s Book Club, a series of articles and events dedicated to classic works of American literature. Click here to R.S.V.P. to a virtual conversation about “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” to be led by Edmund White and held on April 22.

Patricia Highsmith was Tom Ripley without the charm. She was unhappy if an affair was going well, and stirred up trouble with her multiple women lovers — she could only write in a state of high tension. She collected snails and loved observing them, liked their passionless, unconscious way of breeding, thought the French were practically cannibals for eating them. When she was the most in love, oddly enough, she thought of strangling her partner; luckily, she expressed her combination of desire and violence in her writing, not her life. She identified with Ripley, her most famous creation, and would speak of him and his comings and goings as if he were a real person, claiming, “I am a man and I love women.” A vicious anti-Semite, she was also “an equal opportunity offender,” as one of her friends described her. She disliked almost every minority — virtually everyone. Like Ripley, she was a social climber and intensely aware of status; most of her girlfriends were upper middle-class, rich, well-connected, preferably married. Like Ripley, she constantly fantasized; even in her journals she seemed incapable of distinguishing between reality and her inventions. Her most recent biographer, Richard Bradford (the author of “Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires: The Life of Patricia Highsmith,” released this year) points out that many of the affairs minutely recorded in her notebooks are not based on identifiable women or events; she couldn’t distinguish between the real and the fictional. She was an epic drinker, drunk from morning to night. She also liked sex, noting in her diary that she routinely had it ten times a day with women she picked up in bars. Until she fell completely apart, she was attractive and chic.

Ripley is a nobody who bitterly resents his sleazy New York City friends and his low income as a stockroom clerk for the IRS; he is a petty thief who feels not a shred of guilt impersonating a tax collector in order to fleece vulnerable people. When, by chance, he meets Mr. Greenleaf, the rich father of a vague acquaintance, he pretends to be an Ivy Leaguer and the son’s great friend. Fooled, Mr. Greenleaf buys Ripley a first-class ocean liner ticket to Europe and finances a six-week stay in the Italian coastal town of Mongibello (based on Positano), where his son, Dickie, is living as a self-serious but talentless painter. Though Dickie’s mother is dying of leukemia, he refuses to return home to comfort her; after all, he has a villa, a sailboat, a maid and an American admirer, Marge, and life is well within his means (he also has a modest trust fund). Tom Ripley’s job is to charm Dickie, to become his best friend and eventually to persuade him to return to the States and his dying mother. ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/t-magazine/talented-mr-ripley-patricia-highsmith.html
 
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