Small clarification
Faye Dunaway as Milady de Winter
Which movie? I couldn’t find it at IMDb.
Richard Lester’s Musketeers movies (the one’s with Michael York and Raquel Welch)
This version of The Three Musketeers.
Thanks, both of you. I missed that one. Updating the summary, too.
Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct.
Ornella Muti as Princess Aura in the 1980 “Flash Gordon”
Mata Hari Mata Hari - Wikipedia
Who was in The Last Seduction, Linda Fiorentino, I think?
An alphabetized summary with actress names as keys. Includes Ms. Fiorentino in as good an example as there is of our topic:
Mary Astor in the Maltese Falcon
The Baroness
Anna Chapman
Faye Dunaway as Bonnie Parker and Milady de Winter
Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction
Jane Greer from Out of the Past
Mata Hari (2)
Rita Hayworth, The Lady From Shanghai
Hedy Lamarr (2) in Samson and Delilah
Julie London
Ornella Muti as Princess Aura in the 1980 “Flash Gordon”
Natasha Nogoodnik!
Michelle Pfeiffer – Makin’ Whoopie
Jessica Rabbit – Why Don’t You Do Right
Keri Russell (Elizabeth Jennings) on the Americans
Theresa Russell in Black Widow
Barbara Stanwyck (2) in Double Indemnity
Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct
Kathleen Turner (2) in Body Heat
The first one I thought of was Queen Mab, the Winter Queen from the Harry Dresden novels. We even first see her in a version of the “sexy mysterious lady slinks up to the hardboiled PI in his office” routine.
Nico. She was a femme fatale.
Nice. Picture? Movie or whatever?
Butcher… I don’t know, he has Harry pretty much living in quaking fear of women. I thought it was some weird sexual quirk, but now he’s even scared of his 5 year old daughter, so I’m hoping no. It’s a weird bit of subtext, though.
Pretty much everybody with sense is scared of Mab. She really puts the fatale in Femme Fatale.
And she stabbed him through the hand when they first met.
Mab and Titania are scary, but you dilute the scariness when your main character is scared of every woman he meets. Maeve is scary because she’s nuts, Lily’s scary because she’s gorgeous, his godmother’s scary because she’s ruthless, Molly’s scary because she’s attracted to him, Molly’s mother is scary because she disapproves of him, his daughter’s scary because she might not like him, Karrin’s scary because they’re friends - holy crap am I sick of this guy’s fear of owning a penis. Butcher seems to be channeling a huge amount of teen-age dating angst, almost to the level of Japanese culture, where there’s nothing more cruel and dangerous than a teen-aged schoolgirl, apparently.
Anyway, it’s tough to be a femme fatale when your protagonist sees all women as femme fatales, was what I’m saying. Part of what makes them so deadly is how they take a guy out of his comfort zone. If the guy is never comfortable, he’s just jittery and lame.
He meets exceedingly lethal magical women all the time; they as a rule really are that dangerous.
Surely there must be others…
Lucrezia Borgia. Even the Wiki article calls her a femme fatale.
And Jezebel.
I’ll second the nomination of Rita Hayworth, who was also fatale-ish in Gilda, Salome and probably many movies I’ve not seen.
As a historic character, Anne Boleyn should qualify, at least as she’s portrayed in the TV series The Tudors.
What about legendary or fictional characters? Delilah, Salome, or even Eve of the Apple? Or, more recently, Lorelei the Mermaid or Lola of Damn Yankees? (Lola was based in part on the real-life femme fatale, Lola Montez.)