Veronica Lake @ 100: "I Married a Witch"

by Cláudio Alves

"I Married a Witch" | © United Artists

Silky blonde tresses fall over one eye, a face masked by spun gold accented with spidery lashes and a slash of scarlet lipstick. When struggling to promote Veronica Lake's first movies as a full-on movie star, that's the image distributors found, depurating her commercial value into a flat facsimile of her beauty. Whether it was Paramount's poster for Sullivan's Travels or the main art for United Artist's I Married a Witch, it seemed as if Lake was a head of hair first, an actress second. Legend says that once, during the filming of 1941's I Wanted Wings, the young woman kept struggling with a lock of hair falling over her right eye. For the wannabee starlet, it was an irritation. For the studio execs lusting over the teenager, it was the look of a silver screen goddess, instant movie magic. The rest, as they say, is history…

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Beauty Break: Ten Sexiest Witches in Movies

HAPPY HALLOWEEN 👻🎃

Julian Sands in Warlock (1989) though, alas, we haven't seen it.

In the absence of writing time today, how about a visual list. Have you ever wondered why there are so few male witches (or warlocks if you will) in cinema? They're far more common on television. And when warlocks or sorcerers are portrayed in cinema they're usually asexual (sorry but Doctor Strange is the least sexy Avenger!) or old men and are just as likely to be good as evil.

Witches on the other hand are often sexual and usually beautiful... though the beauty is often an illusion. Many of those most glamorous witches are hiding a hideous side -- like they're secretly an old decrepit crone or something less than human (think of Anjelica Huston in The Witches... which we often do). Or maybe they are beautiful but their favourite disguise is something hideous (think Snow White's Queen). This frightening dichotomy and their dangerous sexuality surely has got heaps to do with cinema's male gaze. (This is a way of saying that we hoped for some gender parity in this holiday list of "Sexy Witches!" but it's almost all women.)

AFTER THE JUMP - TEN SEXIEST MOVIE WITCHES...

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