Literary Villains and the real people who inspired them
Inmate, hitwoman, colleague - the people who inspired some of our most memorable fictional villains have fascinating stories of their own.
We’ve been researching the story behind Misery’s Annie Wilkes this week. (Without rewatching the hobbling scene - once in a lifetime is enough for that.)
Stephen King isn’t short on monster material, so why a psychopathic nurse? He famously said, “Annie Wilkes is cocaine”, in reference to his battle with addiction and the book’s role in breaking him free. He was further inspired by a trans-Atlantic dream about being held hostage by an unhinged fan. Then there’s Rob Reiner, the director of the 1990 film, who said the screen character was loosely based on real nurse and serial killer, Genene Jones.
It got us thinking about other literary villains and how they found a way into their author’s minds. Grab that cushion to hide behind; here are three that demanded our attention…
Hannibal Lecter
We all remember the chilling scene in The Silence of the Lambs when Hannibal Lector is revealed behind the glass in his cell. He was everything we didn’t expect in a serial killer: groomed, focused, in control. Here was a man of intellect who just happened – on occasion – to eat people.
In 2013, for the 25th anniversary of his book (on which the film was based), Thomas Harris wrote a piece that revealed who inspired his iconic character.
As a journalist in his early 20s, Harris was asked to go to Mexico to interview a killer on death row, Dykes Askew Simmons. Simmons should have been dead already – he had been shot while trying to escape and was only alive thanks to some quick work from a prison doctor.
The warden introduced Harris to the doctor and they sat to discuss Simmons. Harris was disarmed by the doctor’s astute questions and poised manner, rather at odds in the surroundings. He left such an impression that Harris invited him to call if he were ever travelling in Texas.
On his way out, Harris asked the warden how long the doctor had been working there. It turned out, he wasn’t exactly an employee. He was an inmate and convicted killer named Alfredo Ballí Treviño. He was indeed a doctor - a former surgeon, with skills he had used to dispose of his victim in a surprisingly small box.
For his anonymity, Harris named Treviño ‘Dr Salazar’ in his piece:
“Many years later, I was trying to write a novel. My detective needed to talk to somebody with a peculiar understanding of the criminal mind. Lost in the tunnel of the work, I plodded along behind my detective when he went to the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane to consult with an inmate. Who do you suppose was waiting in the cell? It was not Dr Salazar. But because of Dr Salazar, I could recognise his colleague and fellow practitioner, Hannibal Lecter.”
Villanelle
Who else got hooked on the cat-and-mouse game between Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh in Killing Eve? The hit BBC series was an intoxicating mix of fascination and fear.
The author of the novels behind the show, Luke Jennings, spoke to a literary festival about what inspired his psychopath lead, ‘Villanelle’. Or should we say, who: she was a prolific real assassin known as ‘La Tigresa’.
When Jennings was working on a new novel, he began researching women who kill for a cause - “terrorists as opposed to domestic murderers of the Myra Hindley kind” - and paused on Idoia López Riaño. Riaño was a Spanish ETA hitwoman who was jailed in the 1990s for murders she committed for the Basque terrorist group.
Riaño had been introduced to the group by a teenage boyfriend and quickly rose through the ranks. She gained her nickname ‘The Tigress’ when she began to prowl bars and seduce police officers before killing their colleagues.
Riaño’s vanity was also a point of interest for Jennings (remember Villanelle’s love for designer clothes and admiring herself in the mirror?). In a moment you could mistake for a Killing Eve scene, one of Riaño’s victims had a lucky escape; at the crucial moment, she didn’t see him because she was distracted by the window of a high fashion store and her own reflection in it!
In Riaño, Jennings found the first threads of his bewitching character:
“She killed 23 people, and she was clearly a psychopath and completely, completely without empathy … It was confirmation for me that sociopathic women are prepared to kill in this very promiscuous way.”
Nurse Ratched
In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, first published in 1962, Ken Kesey introduced Nurse Mildred Ratched, the domineering, sadistic administrative head of the psychiatric ward at Salem State Hospital. The American Film Institute ranked her as the fifth greatest villain of all time and second greatest villainess, out-cackled by the Wicked Witch of the West.
Back in 2001, Kesey spoke to the New York Times about the real person who inspired the character. He had written the book while studying for a graduate degree in creative writing at Stanford, but where it gets interesting is the part-time jobs he held at the time.
By day, he volunteered to be a paid subject of experiments with psychomimetic drugs (apparently they gave his imagination a boost!) and by night, he was a night-shift orderly in a psychiatric ward. Watching the patients there was a crash course in the mental health system’s problems, and the head nurse made quite an impression on him – enough so that she became the model for a character in his new book.
Decades after the book had been released and turned into an Oscar-winning movie, Kesey had one of those toe-curling awkward moments. He ran into that same head nurse at an aquarium in Oregon. She recognised Kesey and left no doubt that she’d made the connection, saying, ‘Do you remember me, ‘Nurse Ratched’?’
Kesey’s memories had created a giant of ‘Big Nurse’:
“She was much smaller than I remembered, and a whole lot more human. I didn't know what to say, whether to apologise or what. It was a tremendous relief to me to find that she didn't hold it against me, because you don't want someone like that walking around out there.”
I imagine Harris didn’t really want Treviño to visit him after he found out his history!