Doh, you’re right. I think I was confused by Rhonda Rousey in your post, who IMO is a beauty not a beast. Or I just confused myself independently. I’ll go sit on the group W bench now.
Not quite a great fit, but Shrek works to an extent.
Wasn’t that sort of the plot of “The Way We Were”?
Robert Redford was arguably the top male heartthrob in movies at the time, and Barbra Streisand wasn’t considered “conventionally beautiful”. But he was attracted to her sincerity and devotion to her political causes.
Interesting how in the “she-beast” examples provided, she still looks like an attractive woman who either acts crazy or is 10-15 lbs overweight.
If we’re including SF novels, then the “loathly brides” out of Julian May’s Pleictocene Exile saga would certainly count - mutated aliens who end up taking husbands from the ranks of the sex-starved heavily-male-skewed human population, because they can trick the humans into thinking they’re actually beautiful … until they go to sleep. And while the chief “loathly bride”, Rowane, is clearly a sweet kind thing who only wants to be nice to her man, she is a Firvulag, and they do have those teeth…
I posit that even in the original tales, the male “beast” is not supposed to be sexually unattractive either. In fact, I’d say his beastliness makes him *more *attractive, which is part of the story’s appeal.
Dude’s bad boy cool, as opposed to Bluebeard who is bad boy totally uncool.
Sugarbaby (aka Zuckerbaby) is a 1985 German “romantic comedy” where the lead woman character is an obese mortuary worker. Poster
