It’s not apocryphal, but it’s a very distorted version of what actually happened. From an Independent article :
From Burgess himself:
I saw a reference this somewhere else recently and I don’t know where it comes from. What makes you think Alex raped the cat lady? There’s no indication of that in either the film or the book.
Any of the female performances in the original Alfie with Michael Caine. Surprisingly, I liked the movie but the treatment of women was shocking.
Gallo was her real life partner at the time though.
Well, I don’t know about degrading performance, but about the most degrading role I can think of offhand is from “Perils of Gwendolyne in the Land of the Yik-Yaks,” a French softcore film. Gwendolyne is a British college girl searching for her father, who has disappearned in pre-World War II China. They hook up with a hunky ex-pat who knows a guy who knows how to reach the land of the Yik-Yaks, who hangs out in an opium den/brothel.
So they go to the brothel and find an old white guy lying in a stall with an opium pipe hanging out f his mouth and a naked Chinese woman lying on top of him, her face in his lap, her head bobbing up and down.
So when guests arrives does the old white guy get up of shake hands or anything? No, he just continues to lie there sucking on his pipe while the Chinese woman sucks on his other pipe, while he has a conversation with Gwendolyne and hunky guy about where the Land of the Yik-Yaks is. He’s not one to stand on formalities, and she’s a woman who needs no introduction because she’s got some guy’s genitals in her mouth. Other people may have unimportant stuff to natter on about, but there’s an old why guy who needs some lip service, and she’ll not be distracted by, well, anything, apparently, while she’s on the job.
So I nominate the Woman Who Needs No Introduction. Gotta be a great role for anyone: Woman Who Just Won’t Stop Giving Head. Could be worse. Could be the Third Woman From the Left Who Needs No Introduction.
Brllliant scientists whose role is to carry a nice rack of tits? Take Kelly McGillis as the PhD physicist and instructor in “Top Gun”, but who serves mainly to wear a sheer skirt in backlit scenes and get all gaga over Tom Cruise’s boyishness.
Most degrading? Maggie Gyllenhall in “Secretary”. Of course, that’s what the movie was all about. Even if the character herself thought she was simply totally devoted to her boss.
You have point here. There’s plenty of horror or serious dramas where the women characters fared worse. But I’d bet that they were ok with it at the end since they were likely treated well in reality and made a positive contribution to the film.
I’d bet it’s roles like “Stripper #3” and “Red-Haired Hooker” that actually feel degrading to the actress, even if the characters aren’t raped or sexually humiliated on screen.
Because an attractive woman can’t possibly be interested in an unattractive, older man.
:rolleyes:
Possible, but as an example, Elizabeth Berkeley having sex with Woody Allen in either Small Time Crooks or Curse of Jade Diamond, highly dubious in real life, unless he’s giving her cash and or gifts.
Camille Keaton in I Spit on Your Grave, perhaps?
Could you elaborate a bit?
The most degrading performance by a woman ever? Audrie Neenan, who played the vicious and foulmouthed lesbian gang member “Ray” in the Dirty Harry movie Sudden Impact. She’s apparently only a lesbian because she can’t get a man: she gets drunk and hits on Clint Eastwood who tells her he only dates “humans”; she gets drunk and attempts to crawl into bed with one of her male accomplices, who violently rebuffs her, and she gloatingly presides over Sondra Locke’s violent rape, presumably out of jealousy and spite. Jesus, Clint.
I thought Richards’ acting was fine - it was a Bond film after all, not Shakespeare. I thought that she sounded perfectly comfortable with words like isotope. Your Bond Girl Mileage may vary. De Gustibus Non George Lazenby.
Signing up for Verhoven’s Starship Troopers - THAT’S degrading, IMHO.
My grad school friend could actually talk, was not an airhead, and was a very pleasant person. I imagine she’s still is all of those things, but it’s been years. 
I thought the same thing with the mention of Tra La La in Last Exit to Brooklyn (“Jennifer Jason Leigh’s performance in . . . is up there”). If, based on the OP’s outline, it involves choices made by the character herself rather than the leanings of the dialogue, direction, cinamatography, editing, etc., it gets my vote.
Yeah, and in real life Woody Allen would never be able to have any success dating famous actresses or much younger women…
Hello?
He wouldn’t have if he wasn’t famous himself.
Good point. The characters in most of these movies are usually just regular old guys. Point me to the ‘18-year-old Playmate Weds Retired, 76-year-old Mechanic’ section of Wedding Announcements.
I wondered what you were talking about, and then I watched this (probably NSFW youtube link).
I think Selma Blair has kind of covered both types of degrading. She was in this movie with Cameron Diaz, The Sweetest Thing, where she gets some guy’s dick stuck in her throat or something like that. What made it so painful was that it was just not funny. I bet there were only 4 people in the world who laughed. The whole rest of the world just thought, “Nice career, Selma Blair.”
She also played a really degraded character in Storytelling. She’s an annoying college girl who wants to seduce the professor and he enjoys humiliating her by making her call him nigger during awkward sex that she’s too polite to back out of.
When I saw the thread title, I searched it for references to ‘Showgirls’, and saw damn near every female character mentioned except the loud, crude comedienne at the club where Nomi (Elizabeth Berkeley) worked when she first came to Vegas.
Said comic told a delightful joke that I retell to this day (“If a light sleeper sleeps with a light on, what does a hard sleeper sleep with?”)
But she also told what may have been the most horrifyingly sexist joke I’ve ever heard:
Q: What’s the name for that useless piece of skin around a twat?
A woman