“You aren’t too smart, are you? I like that in a man.” Kathleen Turner to Wiliam Hurt in Body Heat (1981)
“I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.” Kathleen Turner as Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988)
And another femme fatale was born. Turner was following in the tradition laid out for her by other screen sirens of the past: Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, Lana Turner, and so on. Women who weren’t afraid to be the bad girl. Women who knew what they wanted and wouldn’t stop until they got it. And if a little murder was involved, so be it. Bette Davis excelled at it with a slew of performances in, among others, Of Human Bondage (1934), The Little Foxes (1941), The Letter (1940), Mr. Skeffington (1944), and both good and bad in Dead Ringer (1964). So good at being bad.
Barbara Stanwyck also had some moments as a provocative woman. She was in Ladies They Talk About (1932), Baby Face (1933), Double Indemnity (1944), The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), and Crime of Passion (1957). Billy Widler’s Double Indemnity took the archetype to new heights. Billy Wilder’s noir thriller is considered a classic, and so is Stanwyck’s portrayal of seductive and scheming unhappy wife Phyllis Dietrichson. But at least she was honest, admitting to partner-in-crime Fred MacMurray “I’m rotten to the heart.”
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Joan Crawford’s bad girl credits include A Woman’s Face (1941), The Damned Don’t Cry (1950), and Queen Bee (1955) (The last should be remade with Jennifer Lopez playing the unlikeable matriarch; she might at last have that elusive hit!). Lana Turner’s most famous femme fatale role came in 1946 with The Postman Always Rings Twice. Turner was the unhappy wife (seems to be a theme with such women) using her sex appeal to lure drifter John Garfield into helping her murder her older husband.
Gloria Grahame also excelled at being the femme fatale. In The Big Heat (1953) she played a gangster’s moll, a smart cookie with a smart mouth (And what a cutie!). Pragmatic about her life choices, she accepted her station in life willingly. And she is the catalyst for the climatic ending when she takes her revenge. Grahame’s other bad girl roles were in Crossfire (1947), Macao (1952), Sudden Fear (1952) alongside good girl Crawford, and Human Desire (1954), whose poster declareding “She was born to be bad, to be kissed, to make trouble!” And she was.
So who in today’s cinema fills the bill and keeps the tradition of the not-so-sweet woman alive?
The first one who comes to mind is Glenn Close. She’s not afraid to play mean, unlikable or the villain. In Fatal Attraction (1987), she was an obsessed woman stalking married Michael Douglas after an ill-advised fling (“I will not be ignored!” she delcared). For Dangerous Liaisons (1988), Close was deliciously evil as Marquise de Merteuil. 101 Dalmatians (1996) brought out her wickedly funny side as fur-lover Cruella De Vil. Her journey into TV gave us Patty Hewes, a morally ambiguous lawyer, in Damages (2007-12). Close also had many roles playing the heroic or good person. But she never stopped there or worried about being liked. She was the character. And an actress.
Sharon Stone is another actress that excels as the bad girl. Total Recall (1990) gave audiences a glimpse of her deadly cunning, followed by her controversial foray into full-fledged wickedness–and full-fledged nudity, Basic Instinct (1992). Sharon was a different shade of nasty in Martin Scorsese’s Casino (1995).
Meryl Streep never shies away from playing unlikable. Her first screen role was in Julia (1977) as a catty woman named Ann Marie. She was the cool and calculating mother in the remake of The Manchurian Candidate (2004) and the Anna Wintour facsimile Miranda Priestley in The Devil Wears Prada (2006). 2013 brought her to the role of the toxic matriarch Violet in the screen adaptation of Tracy Lett’s explosive family drama August: Osage County. The next year she succumbed to playing a witch in the musical Into the Woods (She had a firm “no witch roles” after she turned 40). In Don’t Look Up (2021), Streep is a self-absorbed U.S. President more interested in her common good than the country’s (I wonder where she looked for inspiration…hmm.). On the small screen she played a manipulative mother looking for answers about her son’s death in Season Two of Big Little Lies.
Linda Fiorentino made a big splash in the 1994 erotic thriller The Last Seduction. Playing a ruthless woman who has no conscience, Fiorentino was mesmerizing. No one was going to stop her from her life goals of male manipulation, money, and sex. Blake Lively had her turn as a beautiful and manipulative bad girl in A Simple Favor (2018) and its bonkers sequel Another Simple Favor (2025) Judging by the awful press she gets, she is very believable as a villainess (“The woman people love to hate”). Rosamund Pike got her stripes as a crafty baddie in Gone Girl (2014) and continued in I Care a Lot (2020), harassing national treasure Dianne Wiest. And in the horror genre, Mia Goth scored big as an unbalanced girl with dreams of stardom in the 2022 Texas-set thriller Pearl.
But where are Julia Roberts’ bad girl roles? Or Jennifer Aniston’s? She had great success playing against type in 2011’s Horrible Bosses. And one of Jennifer Lopez’s best performances was in Hustlers (2019), where she was a stripper who scams her wealthy clients. And wouldn’t it have been fun to see Barbra Streisand being a bitch? Or the extremely likable Sally Field be unlikable? In looking up the screen credits of some of the female stars of today–Jodie Foster, Scarlett Johansson, Angelina Jolie, Florence Pugh, Emma Stone, Reese Witherspoon–there are not a lot of bad girl roles in their résumés. Is it because they all want “lovable” and “heroic” women to play, where the audience likes them? Or are these roles just not being written for actresses anymore?
Who are your bad girl favorites? Let us know in the comments.