Your Favorite Villain/s in Literature

Started by Jaakko Keskinen, December 18, 2018, 06:51:43 AM

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Jo498

I think Rebecca" is one of the cases where the movie is better than the book. This almost never happens with great literature but is not so infrequent with middle brow stuff (which du Maurier probably is, if barely so).

A flamboyant villain not mentioned yet is Count Fosco from Collins' "The woman in white"
Tout le malheur des hommes vient d'une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos, dans une chambre.
- Blaise Pascal

vandermolen

Quote from: Jo498 on December 20, 2018, 01:20:46 PM
I think Rebecca" is one of the cases where the movie is better than the book. This almost never happens with great literature but is not so infrequent with middle brow stuff (which du Maurier probably is, if barely so).

A flamboyant villain not mentioned yet is Count Fosco from Collins' "The woman in white"

You could be right about Rebecca but I greatly enjoyed the book as well which, unusually for me, I have read twice.
"Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm" (Churchill).

'The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good' (Stanley Kubrick).

Jo498

I did not dislike the book although it is probably decades ago that I read, as a teenager I think. I don't even remember if I had seen the movie first (likely) or the other way round. The book is certainly better than the only other du Maurier I read (My Cousin Rachel).
Tout le malheur des hommes vient d'une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos, dans une chambre.
- Blaise Pascal

Jaakko Keskinen

Ian Fleming: Auric Goldfinger (even if the film version of him is vastly superior), Rosa Klebb and Red Grant, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Le Chiffre.
"Javert, though frightful, had nothing ignoble about him. Probity, sincerity, candor, conviction, the sense of duty, are things which may become hideous when wrongly directed; but which, even when hideous, remain grand."

- Victor Hugo

vandermolen

Quote from: Alberich on December 29, 2018, 09:57:30 AM
Ian Fleming: Auric Goldfinger (even if the film version of him is vastly superior), Rosa Klebb and Red Grant, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Le Chiffre.
Rosa Klebb gets my vote view. In the film brilliantly portrayed by Lotte Lenya, the wife of Kurt Weill.
"Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm" (Churchill).

'The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good' (Stanley Kubrick).

lisa needs braces

Baron Vladimir Harkonnen from Dune. Claudius from Hamlet. Cathy from East of Eden (Steinbeck was criticized for having a character who was the embodiment of  >:D >:D >:D >:D but I dug it.)


Jaakko Keskinen

#26
I like Claudius because of ambivalence. Sure, there is little doubt that he is the villain of the play. He may not be a good person but he may be a good king. In his very first scene he handles foreign affairs effectively. He seems to feel remorse even if he cannot truly repent and make amends, plus he loves Gertrude. I read somewhere a pretty convincing opinion that from Claudius's point of view the entire play is almost like Macbeth.
"Javert, though frightful, had nothing ignoble about him. Probity, sincerity, candor, conviction, the sense of duty, are things which may become hideous when wrongly directed; but which, even when hideous, remain grand."

- Victor Hugo

Jo498

Quote from: vandermolen on December 29, 2018, 12:58:10 PM
Rosa Klebb gets my vote view. In the film brilliantly portrayed by Lotte Lenya, the wife of Kurt Weill.
Technically she had been his widow for more than 10 years by the time of "From Russia with Love" and already survived a second husband (as she was to survive a third one)... And Lenya and Weill were also separated or even divorced for some time in the mid-1930s and later remarried (par for the course for 1920s-30s Bohème I guess...)

Another fascinatiing villain is the narrator in "The killer inside me". This is not a first of its kind, there are already several mad villain first person narrators in Poe (Tell-tale heart) but it is very well done.
Tout le malheur des hommes vient d'une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos, dans une chambre.
- Blaise Pascal

lisa needs braces

Quote from: Alberich on January 02, 2019, 07:58:01 AM
I like Claudius because of ambivalence. Sure, there is little doubt that he is the villain of the play. He may not be a good person but he may be a good king. In his very first scene he handles foreign affairs effectively. He seems to feel remorse even if he cannot truly repent and make amends, plus he loves Gertrude. I read somewhere a pretty convincing opinion that from Claudius's point of view the entire play is almost like Macbeth.

Quite right. The play is fascinating because it's kind of hard to pin many of the characters down...

One thing I enjoyed in my recent listen of the audio-play by Branagh is when the witty gravedigger gives Hamlet a taste of his own medicine re banter!

PerfectWagnerite

I like Sauron from Lord of the Rings. Never quite figured out how he missed a gang of hobbits trying to make their way to Mt. Doom.

Christo

In a couple of novels by William Golding, the main character is also (often very subtly) the villain; making for a growingly uncomfortable identification that makes you wonder about ourselves. My favourite is the artist Sammy Mountjoy in Free Fall (1959).
... music is not only an 'entertainment', nor a mere luxury, but a necessity of the spiritual if not of the physical life, an opening of those magic casements through which we can catch a glimpse of that country where ultimate reality will be found.    RVW, 1948

Jo498

It wasn't a gang, only two of them. And he was focussed first on Saruman via the Palantir and after this was taken and mastered by Aragorn on this heir of Isildur. There are plotholes in LotR (e.g. Weathertop) but this is not a major one.
Tout le malheur des hommes vient d'une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos, dans une chambre.
- Blaise Pascal

Jaakko Keskinen

Quote from: PerfectWagnerite on January 02, 2019, 04:11:08 PM
I like Sauron from Lord of the Rings. Never quite figured out how he missed a gang of hobbits trying to make their way to Mt. Doom.

I like Sauron too, however not Sauron from Lord of the Rings but Sauron from Silmarillion. Yes, same character but Sauron is much more fleshed out in Silmarillion. He doesn't even appear in Lord of the Rings, despite being the title character.
"Javert, though frightful, had nothing ignoble about him. Probity, sincerity, candor, conviction, the sense of duty, are things which may become hideous when wrongly directed; but which, even when hideous, remain grand."

- Victor Hugo

Jo498

yes. Sauron is rather anonymous in LotR (not a problem for me as the book has another focus). Most interesting would be Sauron in a more elaborate account of the Fall of Numenor but I think there is only the rather brief one included in the Silmarillion. (Maybe there is more in History of Middle Earth but all this stuff is sketchy.)
Tout le malheur des hommes vient d'une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos, dans une chambre.
- Blaise Pascal

Jaakko Keskinen

Another Fitzgerald villain, Pat Brady. The hilarious part when his daughter Celia finds out Brady had stuffed his mistress temporarily in the closet in the middle of a workday stays vivid in my mind.
"Javert, though frightful, had nothing ignoble about him. Probity, sincerity, candor, conviction, the sense of duty, are things which may become hideous when wrongly directed; but which, even when hideous, remain grand."

- Victor Hugo

vandermolen

#35
'Villanelle' from the book and film 'Killing Eve' (brilliantly played by Jodie Comer) also comes to mind. I've only seen the TV series.
"Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm" (Churchill).

'The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good' (Stanley Kubrick).

PerfectWagnerite

Quote from: Jo498 on January 03, 2019, 12:36:39 AM
It wasn't a gang, only two of them. And he was focussed first on Saruman via the Palantir and after this was taken and mastered by Aragorn on this heir of Isildur. There are plotholes in LotR (e.g. Weathertop) but this is not a major one.
They started out with 4.

Weathertop is a gaping plot hole in my opinion. The Ring Wraiths KNEW Frodo had the Ring. How were they not able to trak the Hobbits later on ?

Quote from: Alberich on January 03, 2019, 12:49:26 AM
I like Sauron too, however not Sauron from Lord of the Rings but Sauron from Silmarillion. Yes, same character but Sauron is much more fleshed out in Silmarillion. He doesn't even appear in Lord of the Rings, despite being the title character.
I think Peter Jackson gave him more substance with the glowing, flaming, lidless eye than Tolkien ever did.

JBS

Quote from: PerfectWagnerite on January 04, 2019, 06:08:57 PM
They started out with 4.

Weathertop is a gaping plot hole in my opinion. The Ring Wraiths KNEW Frodo had the Ring. How were they not able to trak the Hobbits later on ?
I think Peter Jackson gave him more substance with the glowing, flaming, lidless eye than Tolkien ever did.

Defeat at the Ford set them back severely, as the book specifically notes. After that, Frodo with the Ring was effectively hidden from Sauron in Rivendell and Lothlorien, and ( by implication )while passing through Moria. And Sauron had no way to tell if Frodo had, willingly or not, given the Ring to Elrond, Gandalf,  Galadriel, or Aragorn, as long as it was not used.  As noted, the wars with Saruman and Gondor distracted him, as did the business of the Palantir.  It wasn't until Frodo claimed the Ring for himself that Sauron had a chance to home in on the Ring's location.

Jackson may have amplified the Eye, but it is referred to very specifically by JRRT. It is possible to read the references to the Eye  as metaphor, but the Eye is an important feature: Frodo several times senses it trying to search out the location of the Ring.

Hollywood Beach Broadwalk

JBS

My own favorite villians
Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility
Bosola in the Duchess of Malfi (perhaps he qualifies as an antihero, not a villian)
Saruman

Hollywood Beach Broadwalk

PerfectWagnerite

Has the Shrike been mentioned? That is one scary dude right there.