Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet and Amy Smart in Crank come to mind.
But whoa, have you seen Priscilla Barnes in the obscure 1970s sex comedy The Seniors? In this movie, she’s a chick who fucks all four main characters in the quad AND she does the cooking and cleaning, no questions asked. Why? She’s a nympho who likes to fuck everyone AND cooks and cleans. Soon, the dudes in the quad pass her off to a nerdy boy that did them a favor. Nerd Boy really really really wants to fuck her. So she fucks him. She also has zero lines.
Nicole Kidman, in Dogville. Or Emily Watson, in Breaking the Waves. Or Bjork, in Dancer in the Dark.
Or pretty much any woman in any Lars von Trier film, actually. I can only imagine what his *Medea *was like (haven’t seen that one.) And he doesn’t do his men much better. Guy’s got some serious issues, and I wish I would stop watching his therapy on film.
Then there’s the other kind of degrading, as with Darryl Hannah playing an astrophysicist in Roxanne. Single-handedly reversed 100 years of accepting women as intellectual equals.
oh, come on – she had plenty of help. Racquel Welch in Fantastic Voyage, Denise Richards in The World is Not Enough. Plenty of Lookers-who-are-supposed-to-be-brilliant-scientists-but-who-don’t-convince out there.
Oh, if those count, Tara Reid as an archaeologist (!) in the otherwise believable Alone in the Dark, where she pronounces Newfoundland the way an 8-year old non-Canadian would- that no one else in the cast or crew caught this is not surprising.
I was going to say Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls, but you are right, she is practically an example of respectability compared to the ones you’ve mentioned.
Of course, the entire *point *of that performance is the degradation… how low she is willing to go to score the drugs. She’s a fully-developed character at least. I mean, are we talking about performances in which the character is degraded, or performances which are degrading for women in general? Because we could talk about women’s roles in a lot of movies in the 70s and 80s, particularly of the violent Death Wish/Dirty Harry genre, where basically they were bloodied victims, whores, innocent wife/girlfriends, or some combination thereof.
Ever seen the Mystery Science Theatre-d movie Hobgoblins? The slut character and the fantasy woman/bestality-lover character are both degrading to women in general, the actresses in particular, and movie viewers.
I have to raise an exception on Denise Richards. I went to grad school (in physics) with a woman who looks a lot like her. I am, therefore, probably the only male who found Denise Richards’ performance as Dr. Christmas Jones - Nuclear Physicist - credible.
But it works for her, right? So is it really degrading? Are we talking women who are degraded against their will/no other choice or because they like it?
I don’t consider Maggie Gyllenhaal in Secretary degraded, for example.
Any one of a thousand performances where an attractive young actress played a character who is desperately attracted to the main character who was being played by an unattractive actor twenty or thirty years older than her.
I vote for Edith Massey as Edie the Egg Lady in John Waters’ Pink Flamingos (though I would vote for Divine, in the same movie, if the definition of ‘woman’ was a generous one).