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Best Villains Of All Time?

Swifty said:
I like Yul Bynner in the original Westworld film .. mainly because he was the original Terminator but also because he had cool silver eyes. My careers advisor at school actually asked where he could get a pair ..
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Brynner was brilliant in that movie. I still get the occasional nightmare where I'm being chased by the gunslinger.
 
Four pages in and no-one's mentioned Judge Doom? For shame...

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I would like to add Steerpike from the "Gormenghast" books. When he first appears I found myself identifying with him and supported his desire to escape his suffocating, degrading life. But as the story develops he becomes a monster in his obsession to destroy the Groans which I found disturbing.
As for the distaff side.... the White Witch from "The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe". As a child the way she seduced Edmund with Turkish Delight, and the pagan sacrifice of Aslan was truly evil (although I must add that now I'm an adult pagan sacrifice doesn't bother me so much:twisted:)
 
The fictional villains all pale when compared to Hitler, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, and other real figures of our dark history.
 
They're not as amusing to watch or read about, however.
 
Robert Mitchum in both Night of the Hunter and Cape Fear.

Orson welles in Touch of Evil - possibly the best bad cop ever, certainly the sweatiest.

My most recent favourite uncomplicated, utterly unsympathetic and bad to the bone bad guy would be Roland Vogel in the French series Braquo - an irredeemable cock of the first water, and no mistake.
 
Spookdaddy said:
Robert Mitchum in both Night of the Hunter and Cape Fear.
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Mitchum was a really chilling villain.
A few others that spring to mind:
Fats the ventriloquist’s dummy in Magic
Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man
Jessica Walter in Play Misty for Me
Robert Shaw in From Russia With Love
and Ricardo Montalban as KHAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNN! in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
 
Spookdaddy said:
Orson Welles in Touch of Evil
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I always wonder if his fat, sweaty cop owed something to the fat, sweaty assassin Banat in Journey into Fear, 1943.

Played by non-professional Jack Moss - an agent, by all accounts - in a single screen appearance, he gives off a real sense of menace. The film is credited to Norman Foster but Welles's fingerprints are all over it. :cooll:

It's a film I much prefer to those not-so-Magnificent Ambersons! :p
 
Star Trek's Borg Queen...
 
Loki, sexy and crazy, wonderful combo, especially as its Tom Hiddleston playing him

Loved Silas played by Paul Brittany in The da Vinci Code

Alex Krycek was a SOB as well
 
Swifty said:
I like Yul Bynner in the original Westworld film .. mainly because he was the original Terminator but also because he had cool silver eyes. My careers advisor at school actually asked where he could get a pair ..
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I know a West-End production manager who, as a young stagehand, had worked on one of the revival productions of The King and I (I think it would have been at the London Palladium in the early 70's). According to him, and others I have heard in the business, Brynner was utterly loathed: demanding, aggressive, sexually bullying and insanely protective of an equally unlikeable offspring (to the point of laying hands on anyone who stood up to the boy) .

On his final performance the barefooted Brynner had to shuffle from the stage to his dressing room - the stagehands had, allegedly, tin-tacked the entire backstage area as a little gesture of their regard for the man.

It sounds like an apocryphal story - and possibly it is - but one thing I suspect many outsiders are blissfully unaware of is that the backstage working life of West End theatres was, up until relatively recently, heavily populated by members of old-school crime families and their acquaintances, who were all perfectly capable of exacting their own brand of retribution. (I met some very 'interesting' people - including, supposedly, the late 60's most successful cat burglar, as he described himself with obvious pride: ...never 'urt no-one - just climbed over the rooves of 'ooever was in the papers that week and nicked their sparklers....made myself a coffee in Mick Jagger's flat while 'e was snoring on the sofa in fackin' ladies underwear. Only caught me 'cause I fell off a roof in Regents Park and landed on an ambulance.)
 
Spookdaddy said:
I know a West-End production manager who, as a young stagehand, had worked on one of the revival productions of The King and I (I think it would have been at the London Palladium in the early 70's). According to him, and others I have heard in the business, Brynner was utterly loathed: demanding, aggressive, sexually bullying and insanely protective of an equally unlikeable offspring (to the point of laying hands on anyone who stood up to the boy) .

On his final performance the barefooted Brynner had to shuffle from the stage to his dressing room - the stagehands had, allegedly, tin-tacked the entire backstage area as a little gesture of their regard for the man.

It sounds like an apocryphal story - and possibly it is - but one thing I suspect many outsiders are blissfully unaware of is that the backstage working life of West End theatres was, up until relatively recently, heavily populated by members of old-school crime families and their acquaintances, who were all perfectly capable of exacting their own brand of retribution. (I met some very 'interesting' people - including, supposedly, the late 60's most successful cat burglar, as he described himself with obvious pride: ...never 'urt no-one - just climbed over the rooves of 'ooever was in the papers that week and nicked their sparklers....made myself a coffee in Mick Jagger's flat while 'e was snoring on the sofa in fackin' ladies underwear. Only caught me 'cause I fell off a roof in Regents Park and landed on an ambulance.)
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I had no idea he was loathed .. he never came across as 'warm' on screen but I just put that down to the roles he was playing ..

I once sat in a BBC lorry after blagging my way onto a shoot of One Foot In The Grave .. it was a lighting lorry, the old bloke (called Arthur) told me about how he lit the Queen's Christmas speeches each year. He pointed to an attractive older blonde woman looking busy with the film crew outside setting up a crane shot and said "...and you see her, she's shagging Prince Charles" .. it wasn't Camilla and this was before any Charles and Diana scandals had been in the papers so I didn't take him seriously.
 
Spookdaddy said:
I know a West-End production manager who, as a young stagehand, had worked on one of the revival productions of The King and I (I think it would have been at the London Palladium in the early 70's). According to him, and others I have heard in the business, Brynner was utterly loathed: demanding, aggressive, sexually bullying and insanely protective of an equally unlikeable offspring (to the point of laying hands on anyone who stood up to the boy) .
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Brynner didn't get along with Steve McQueen during the shooting of The Magnificent Seven, mainly due to McQueen's constant attempts to upstage him.
According to Eli Wallach's autobiography, Yul Brynner had a major problem with what he perceived as Steve McQueen's trying to upstage him. According to Wallach, McQueen would do things when on screen with Brynner to draw attention to his character. Examples were his shaking of the shotgun shells and taking off his hat to check the sun during the hearse scene and leaning off his horse to dip his hat in the river when the Seven cross into Mexico. Brynner was supposedly so worried about McQueen stealing his limelight in scenes that he hired an assistant to count the number of times McQueen touched his own hat when he [Brynner] was speaking.
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http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054047/trivia?ref_=tt_ql_2
 
ramonmercado said:
God kills half a million people. it is clear that God is the villain in the fictional stories of the bible.
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Yeah. Although God then did an amazing PR job to paint Satan as the villain.
 
That was man blaming satan, as it was man that writ that fairytale, they didnt want their god accused of such things, so they made someone up, of cause, if there was a god, he might have just said 'Meh'
 
Well I recently rewatched The Comfort of Strangers (Paul Schrader, 1990) - a fairly Fortean psychological thriller - based on the Ian Mcewan novel of almost a decade earlier.

The antagonist is a Venetian/foreign man of wealth with a fetishistic obsession. He is known only as Robert and is ably portrayed by Christopher Walken.

I nominate that man.

comfort of stangers.jpg
 
Zeke Newbold said:
Well I recently rewatched The Comfort of Strangers (Paul Schrader, 1990) - a fairly Fortean psychological thriller - based on the Ian Mcewan novel of almost a decade earlier.

The antagonist is a Venetian/foreign man of wealth with a fetishistic obsession. He is known only as Robert and is ably portrayed by Christopher Walken.

I nominate that man.

View attachment 3700
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Does he do the usual Walken villain behaviour for that role?
 
min_bannister said:
Count Orlok
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I know this is based on him, but I think Dracula should get a mention. How many times has he been portrayed on film, stage and TV and by how many actors? Loads. He's like Sherlock Holmes in that respect.

Tom Ripley is a good example of a villain that I never want to see getting caught.
Has anyone said Bill Sykes, or rather Oliver Reed's particular version?
 
Mythopoeika said:
Does he do the usual Walken villain behaviour for that role?
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Well, yes a bit, but I'd say that he underplays it somewhat on the less is more principle, which works. He just lets Harold Pinter's script carry him.

The film is easily Youtubable, so... make up your own mind.
 
Zeke Newbold said:
Well, yes a bit, but I'd say that he underplays it somewhat on the less is more principle, which works. He just lets Harold Pinter's script carry him.

The film is easily Youtubable, so... make up your own mind.
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It's on DVD too. Helen Mirren is sooo creepy in that film.
 
Sand Dan Glokta from Joe Abercrombie's The First Law Books. Evil and funny, he's an anti-hero as everyone is a villain to some extent in those books.

Herbert West

Stormbringer
 
No hate/fear here for Tom Ewell, incest rapist, racist, would-be child stabber from the book and
the movie "To Kill A Mockingbird"? His evil is why Boo Radley is great.
 
Some non-human competition. Villainy - it's all in their nature innit?

HAL9000 ~ 2001:A Space Odyssey
The Broodmother of the xenomorphs ~ Aliens.

 
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